Shadow of the Raven
by Choonz
Summary: Moghedien is a prisoner of the Seanchan. Mat and Tuon negotiate treachery and intrigue. Rand comes into possession of a dangerous artifact. And a young Seanchan prince learns his dark destiny. The Fourth Age is every bit as dangerous as the Third, and the stakes just as monumental, overshadowed by the legacy of Tarmon Gai'don.
1. Chapter 1: Lament for the Long Night

**PROLOGUE**

 **Chapter 1: Lament for the Long Night**

With an arid gasp, the last of the mules fell dead. The woman known as Mother looked around her, and saw only an ocean of sand as far as the eye could see in every direction. That was when she knew she had found the perfect place.

She raised a hand, and her trudging flock drew up, grateful for the respite. Uncaring, perhaps for the reason why. A dust-devil swirled, kicking up the abrasive mica sand, and Mother bent down, scooping up a handful.

The people watched, mutely, swathed in their protective _cadin'sor_ clothing, _shoufa_ dust veils up against the stinging sand as Mother let it slowly trickle through her fingers.

Amongst the hard-edged glitter of the mica, there were minute crystalline flakes of white that her callused fingers crumbled to powder. Coral sand. Many turns of the Wheel ago, this land had been under the ocean, populated by parrot fishes. Some day in an Age to come, perhaps the seas would reclaim it once more.

That did not matter. What did was that this ground had been untouched by the Breaking and its aftershocks. It was virgin ground. A place, perhaps, that had not felt a human footfall till they came there.

Her name was Latra Posae Decumae, and today was her naming-day. She was six hundred and eighty-three years old. She was Aes Sedai. The Book of the Nym contended that the lot of Man was three score years and ten. The Servants of All were held to be an exception, lives lived in vigour and strength into the centuries.

She and her followers had spent the last seventy years on the run. As for the common folk, in this troubled time, their lives were apt to be violent, brutal and short.

They had called it the Breaking of the World, or simply The Breaking. Words were insufficient, lives were short and memory faded. If humanity re-established civilization – if the world itself did not founder like a stricken ship – their descendants would know little of the cataclysm their world had endured. It would be to them a shadow upon their collective consciousness. A cresting wave, sweeping away everything that had come before. A world of light and reason, scoured away.

* * *

It had begun with Lews Therin Telamon's attempt to seal the Dark One from the World. Latra clicked her tongue irritably at his memory. He had been a hard-headed, arrogant demagogue with a glib tongue and a handsome face. By instinct, the Dragon was a patrician, choosing to lead by example and sponsorship. But where charm or diplomacy failed him, he was high-handed, aloof. Self-righteous.

When push came to shove, the 'Lord of the Morning' was a ruthless autocrat, riding roughshod over democracy, relying on his charisma and charm for his mandate. And his friends and allies amongst the Hall of Servants were men of the same stamp. Barid Bel. Duram Laddel. Tel Janin.

Yet somehow as the Dark One rose, and his former friends were subverted and fell, Lews Therin had remained true to the Light. Grudgingly, she conceded that he rose to the task as if born to it.

In another season, she might have been the first to raise the cry: _sic semper tyrannis!_ and plunge the knife. But despot or not, he had been the man the times required. He had proved himself an able strategist and commander, the equal of the wealth of military talent the Dark One had at his disposal – Demandred, Be'lal, Sammael, Rahvin.

Yet the greatest thing the Lord of the Morning had done was to stiffen the backbone of a soft, timid and frightened people, children huddling in the dark, watching the candles of hope being snuffed out, one by one.

He held the Lightfriends together as the world they had known slid into fear and despair. His certainty had been their greatest asset, and he had not wavered, not once. Not when his friend Elan Morin had stood in the Hall of Servants itself and proclaimed the sure and certain end of the Wheel, of time itself, and his own new allegiance to the Dark One. Not even when Tel Janin had betrayed the supposedly impregnable Gates of Hevan, the great fortress-complex of _cuendillar_ -ribbed plasteel with its laser batteries, electronic firewalls and perfect forward-security Galois group encryption, protected from channelling and even Gateways by the city of Satelle's Ogier _stedding._

* * *

Latra Posae remembered only too well the fate of the city of her birth. A man-made massif, Satelle, a sculpted hive of humanity. The Gates of Hevan grown up around it like an oyster shell, over the fifty-year respite allocated by the mercies of the Light; builded by men of craft, far-sighted artisans, against this inevitable day, as the world slid irrevocably into madness and the Shadow waxed. A transparent armour, hermetically sealing away a pearl of great price, a spiny geodesic, bristling with upthrust towers and armament emplacements, like a viral capsid.

Inside the Gates, every available inch surrounding the gigantic hive was terraced with hydroponic gardens, layer stacked upon layer under the convex surface of the dome. There were no herds of livestock within. With space at a premium, flora trumped fauna, acreage of soya beans providing protein and lipid sufficient to purpose in lieu of meat and milk. Any shortfall was amply made up by vat-grown meat brewed within the city – genetically-engineered bacteria containing multiple copies of the desired plasmid overexpressing the required protein, which was then harvested and purified.

In the fields, brown-smocked Dai'shain Aiel gardened with hoe and mattock whilst Ogier tended under the oversight of the Nym, Ayahuastha, keening the Song of Growing to bring forth bounty.

The Ogier _stedding_ kept the blight at bay. There was no rot or corruption within Satelle, even though in the outside world, the Shadow's touch was rife, and even Aes Sedai Keepings were wont to fail. The blessing of the Light, vouchsafed by the Green Man. Nobody would starve within Satelle, come what may.

The endless checkerboard fields also served another, grimmer purpose. Blotting out the uninterrupted vista of charnel horror – all too evident through the transparent barrier – from the witness of the beleaguered citizens of Satelle.

The fortress metropolis was like to be their tomb. Surrounded by a moat of Trollocs and Myrddraal. Inhuman enemies, as far as the eye could see, spanning from horizon to horizon, pressing forward into the interminable hail of missiles and strobing ruby pulses of laser light as fast as they could be cut down in mindless death. Shadowspawn of every stripe lumbering up a crumbling, subsiding dune of their dead and dying to hurl themselves bodily against unyielding glass. Rifled slugs chewed their ranks apart, and gouting explosions flung corpses high into the air with haphazard abandon. Forced forward into the meat-grinder, not by the Myrddraal lash, but the sheer pressure of the bodies behind.

The Dreadlords directing the assault were happy to take the appalling losses. Every Trolloc cut down by a laser drained another quanta of energy from the city's reserves. Every Mryddraal, preferentially targeted by the firecomputer's visual-recognition software, stopped a half-dozen 50cal rounds, from the defender's finite supply, flailed by a scourge of lead before succumbing, twitching in a macabre dance of death. The garrison would run out of bullets before the Lord of the Grave ran out of warm bodies.

In time, the Gates of Hevan would be left only sporadic use of the laser armament for defence, powered by photovoltaic cells, which would mean they could only kill Shadowspawn and once-men during the daylight hours. Eventually, the cells themselves would fail.

Fail, as all things of men seemed doomed to in these dying days.

Here and there, lumpen outcroppings thrust up from the plain, ten or twelve yards in height, of mottled grey, fabricated from something that resembled chewed waxen paper. The _cafar_ hives were given a respectful berth by the other creatures of the Shadow, the ground within twenty yards around each left clear despite the claustrophobic press of sweating bodies.

The sting of the grey and black-banded wasps carried a lethal neurotoxin, gifting an agonized, lingering end, whereas the prick of a queen's ovipositor yielded far worse than the surety of mere madness and death. Awareness trapped within the confines of your mind, you would look out upon the world without agency, even as your body was set to task, slaved by an alien taskmaster. Unable to so much as blink, let alone sleep, drink or eat, driven with inhuman purpose until every last drop of vigour was eked from you. Only then would you would finally be permitted to fall, a husk discarded.

Approaching a _cafar_ nest was tantamount to suicide for any save their creator, but otherwise, bloodwrasps left Darkfriends and creations of the Shadow well alone. The same was decidedly _not_ the case for other human beings, still less Ogier, which sent the swarms into a mindless killing-frenzy.

That was the bloodwrasps' purpose. To winnow out Friends of the Light, would-be infiltrators and saboteurs brave or foolhardy enough to walk into an army of Shadowspawn. Part of it anyway.

The chittering wasps were augmented, allowing them to perform their primary function. Their tiny brains programmed to store and relate a limited amount of what they heard, possesseing sufficient faculties to record and parse that which was recognisably human speech. _Cafar_ swarmsfunctioned as a biological computer, their hierarchy dividing computational tasks efficiently amongst the collective, capable of machine-learning.

A bloodwrasp swarm comprising one or two nests was able to accomplish little. Thousands upon thousands of swarms in concert, however, could function as the nodes of a computer system, enabling massively-parallel processing, able to be set to any task imaginable, from cryptanalysis to running the infrastructure for mass surveillance, juxtaposing snippets of seemingly unconnected information and snatches of overheard conversation to piece together the most labyrinthine conspiracy. A purpose their creator, Aginor found most useful, enabling the unworldly academic to maintain his standing amongst the scheming ranks of the Forsaken.

Here, all that immense computational power had been brought to bear, hundreds of thousands of swarms focused upon a single task: brute-forcing the passkey for the Gates of Hevan. The defenders observed the tumescent gray hives with ill-concealed unease, and forked fingers to avert the Evil Eye, more so than for any other Shadowspawn, or even the Dreadlord channellers, despite the overwhelming probability that guessing the passphrase would take tens, even hundreds of thousands of years. It might fall in the next five minutes, too. The next hour. The plexiglass gates rolling up, the Shadowspawn rolling in. The Dark One's luck was proverbial.

Five minutes or fifty thousand years, the Shadow waited. Bent upon the end of all things. That inhuman patience was proverbial, too.

Not just Shadowtwisted answered the bidding of the Lord of the Grave. _Atha'an Shadar_ crewed the Shadow's artillery parks. Once-men, Darkfriend traitors who had cast off their humanity like an ill-fitting cloak. A phalanx of cold-wrought steel from the forges of Thakan'dar rose above the enemy ranks, the long, rifled barrels lofting a steady barrage of DU darts in graceful parabolic arcs to impact flush, perpendicular to the surface of the barrier. The ozone sizzle and hum of maglev generators, charging the thick neodymium coils that impelled railgun munitions, cast-iron battering-rams the length of tree-trunks, in flat trajectories to thwack against the sides of the reinforced dome at half-hourly intervals.

If the Gates of Hevan were truly impervious to the One Power, the siegecraft of evil men could still bring them low, eventually, the yards-thick plexiglass already pitted by the ceaseless impacts, the transparent barrier striated in places by the tell-tale crosshatching of stress fractures, as though scored repeatedly by a sharp blade.

On the other side, defending the dome, legions of Dai'shain and soldiers on track-mounted articulated platforms aimed gouting hoses, the hydrants spraying gallons of fast-acting epoxy contact adhesive to stiffen, seal and patch the weakened sections as best they could, buying time for the plasteel polymer of the barrier to slowly self-heal.

The enemy without had already learned the hard way not to use their megawatt lasers. Fused glassy pockmarks, still too hot to walk upon, marred the plain where the reflected beams had scorched and seared, the splayed fingers of an outstretched, pleading hand. The crystalline matrix of the dome, permeable to most visible wavelengths of light, had a high refractive index in the optimal frequency bands for laser weaponry, the tightly-focused beams meeting the dome, only to rebound viciously into the Shadowspawn ranks, splintered chevrons of flickering crimson fire, a diffraction pattern searing the ground in charred furrows, the work of a mad ploughhand.

The ground rumbled with muffled thunder as Dreadlords hammered the earth with weaves of Earth and Fire, breaking ground, and armoured 'dozers driven by Darksworn Once-Men, toiled alongside full-grown _jumara_ and Worms, gouging the earth in an effort to undermine the city walls.

Evidence of their burrowing labours manifested in the form of molehills of displaced rubble and soil, spoil-heaps hundreds of feet high, and lumpen ridges traversing the plain. Mercifully, the chthonic horrors themselves were hid from view, shut up in the bowels of earth. Their task, a futile one. They would find the dome was a sphere. As above, so below.

The air battening with Draghkar. Flapping crows and ravens, teeming in their millions, come to claim their pound of flesh.

Somewhere, out there beyond the curvature of the horizon, lay armed camps. The Shadow's breeding pens where captured humans were reared for meat, fodder for _Casin Hob'_ steeming legions. This was humanity's designated place in a world ruled by the Lord of the Grave.

Death had come to the realms of men, and the bill was long overdue.

The tower of guard had been formidably garrisoned. Hundreds of thousands of human soldiers, trained to the top of their bent, to defend a city of five million people. Men and women in sleek, black-lacquered ceramite armour, with argon shocklances, pulseswords and energy shields, hard faces masked behind smokeglass-visored, insectile helms with their built-in comms antennae mandibles.

Four-armed ShivaSuits stalked out their restless malevolence, warding the dome's perimeter. Avatars of an archaic goddess of death, unlovely pylons of sculpted heartstone rearing twenty feet high. Their gantries, a wickerwork lattice, fitted for sacrificial rites, the sere white of bleached bone.

The powerful principal hydraulic limbs of each war-walker were articulated by a female pilot, her _cuendillar_ PowerFists gripping warscythe and powermace with augmented might, whilst her gunner hefted a lascannon and flamethrower in the other pair of gauntlets.

The ShivaSuit operators and their co-pilots were former Amayar coralsingers, who had renounced the Water Way. Their cheeks smeared with their own blood before every battle, the Lost warred with pitiless ferocity, as though to make up for their former pacifism, for all that they would not touch a sword.

 _Life is an illusion_ , the Amayar believed. A nightmare, which they would one day wake from. The Lost had embraced the macabre reality of this world with a whole heart. Fouled themselves with it, steeping their hands elbow-deep in warm, wet blood.

 _No love. No hope. No fear._ That was their creed. Despair gave them indurate strength as dark as the Shadow itself.

Given a free hand, the Lost Warriors would have thrown the gates wide and stormed out into the death they embraced with every breath, reaping forward towards the black banner of Ba'alzemon until they were dragged down. They cared not for their own lives, or the lives of anyone else for that matter. Only to fight _Shai'tan_. They knew no calling but black-handed death.

Small wonder, after all their peoples had endured at the hands of the Shadow, who persecuted those sworn to peace above all others, and with hideous cruelty.

The relentless war-walkers terrified the men they served alongside, almost as much as the Shadowsworn they faced. But the Lost knew duty, and their oath was as strong as that of any Ogier.

The Treebrothers were here, too, shoulder to shoulder with short-lived humans for the first time in living memory. Hundreds of burly Ogier, each standing as tall as a man on horseback, armed with black-cleaving double-headed axes and chainrifles machined in Satelle's armouries. The _alantin_ had mustered to war only after interminable deliberation, but wholeheartedly. Oh, yes. They would have no truck with Leafblighter. For the implacable Gardeners, it was war unyielding. Root and branch.

 _Up axes, and clear the field!_

None of these formidable obstacles had deterred Tel Janin Aellinsar, Satelle native, from the consummate treachery. Nor the appalling amorality of the act he contemplated in betraying his own city to the Shadow. The cadet Rodholder's perfidy was motivated by nothing more than envy, having been passed over for a promotion by his rival, Lews Therin Telamon.

Man's envy of his fellow, a thing to be feared. It had brought low many strong places since the beginning of the world.

Whilst assuming the façade of a punctilious and dedicated military professional, the Betrayer of Hope and a small cadre of Darkfriend hackers unleashed a swarm of viruses, co-opting the 'Internet of Things' from within Satelle itself to sink their tendrils deep into the city, a persistent, silent encroachment seeping into every electronic crevice. Subverting infrastructure and personal devices, penetrating into the ubiquitous Cloud, seeking paydirt.

His goal was unfettered access into the lives of the sysadmins who had what he needed. From there, Tel Janin depended upon the foibles of human nature to do the rest of his work for him, the inevitably porous membrane between the personal and work lives of the men and women who maintained the command centre of the Rorn M'Doi. A place informally known as 'the Pentagon' for no apparent reason by the eWarriors, cryptarchs and tech servitors stationed there, as all such places had been designated since time out of mind.

There was no hope of hacking into the hardened military intranet itself, of course, a segregated and formidably-protected system running the keygen computers controlling the portals and fire-solution batteries for the laser armaments and artillery. With his middling security clearance, the stocky blademaster with his sneering gash of a mouth could not override the mainframe safeguards. Nor was that necessary to Tel Janin's dark design, as he waited with terse patience, counting the days. Hand idly caressing the sabre-scar Lews Therin had given him as he stalked out his rounds.

The Shadow never slept.

Hollow heart feeling the interminable ache of separation from _saidin_. Yes, that was the worst of his injuries by the hand of the Dragon, being condemned to serve long years in a purgatory where he could not so much as sense the True Source. Another affront to lay against Lews Therin. But he _would_ be avenged.

Tel Janin never forgot a slight.

Eventually, his machinations paid dividends. A flash music device was the inocuous instrument, carried to work within the Pentagon by an unwitting cryptanalysis tech. Plugged in to charge, the Trojan malware infecting it proved sufficient to compromise the lighting system for the Gates of Hevan.

Oh, a simple thing. Carrying the Shadow down into the Rorn M'Doi itself, the command hub where the encryption-key generating engines were housed, controlling the portals to the city.

Ten long seconds of pitch-darkness before the backup generators kicked in proved ample time for a flood of Myrddraal to twist themselves into being within the beating heart of the Lightfriend fortress, spilling over the panicked defenders in a riptide of black Thakan'dar steel.

Appropriately, considering his unconscionable lapse, the hapless tech servitor had been the first man in Setalle to perish. Headphones over his ears, eyes closed, he never even noticed the Light leave him. The dull click drowned by the music dinning in his ears, fingers thrumming the desk as he beat out the hypnotic rhythm of the organ solo from Joar Addam Nessosin's 'Rites of Love'. Mercifully oblivious to the gaunt, hard shadow rearing up behind him, bleakest ebony resolving from ambient black. The Myrddraal's corpse-white lips split in a grim-cleaving sneer as its long iron speared down.

At least it was quick. A mercy any man might wish for, his blood expunging his guilt.

The first of millions. There would be no survivors.

The Lurks, cold and calculating as any man, and surpassingly cruel, opened the great gates to the teeming hordes of Shadowspawn without. The breached city a dining-table spread before them, the Trollocs and Halfmen glutted themselves on Satelle.

It was unimaginable, that depredation. Unspeakable. An orgy of torment and degradation, perpetrated by the Shadowtwisted and their once-human cohorts, vying with each other in violence.

Tel Janin, the worst of them all. Festooned in feastday viscera, a screeching maenad loosed to ravage and slaughter. Running amok, unleashing his blademaster skills, cutting down defenceless victims with a heron-mark sword of steel. A Power-wrought blade that gave the lie to the Way of the Leaf, hewing men without notching or even dulling that peerless ebon edge. His pent hate, all that taut, controlled rage denied for so long, a razor stropped by their helpless plight. Enervated by the few foes he faced with the skills to put his to mortal test.

This was what Tel Janin lived for! The ultimate wager, life and death balanced upon the blade's edge. Man against man, until the weaker was dismembered by the stronger. His chattels, yours to enjoy, the firstfruits of victory. Taking a man's portion from the trencher with your good right hand.

Oh, would that he had Lews Therin's neck under his edge! For this was no bloodless tournament. Man's martial nature shackled by gentility and constraint. This was _his_ domain, not Lews Therin's.

No rules. No escape. No mercy. No tricks of the One Power. Only the savage satiation of heavy blade carving meat, upon the banqueting table of the Great Lord.

And in this contest, Tel Janin was sure, it would be he who would stand triumphant at the end. He _would_ slay the Dragon. He _would_ be _Nae'blis_ , as he had been promised. First among men, under the auspices of the Lord of the Grave.

Only, he had forsaken that identity. Sloughed his humanity to be reborn in blood and gore. Clawing his way to the world from the violated body of the city that bore him, accompanied by her screams. Tethered to the Dark One by an umbreakable umbilicus of nightmare black. From then on he would be known as _Sammael_. Destroyer of Hope. The name of an immortal demon, not a living man of flesh and blood.

Culan Cuhan, First Rodholder of the Air, had been sent to relieve the city by the Dragon. His armada of MetalHawks and bombers had been intended to crush the forces of the Shadow, smearing them like a bluebottle against the unbreakable walls of Satelle. He had arrived to find nobody to rescue. None left living to fight for. Only a charnel city of the dead.

The Light help him, he had wanted to see for himself.

Grimacing, Culan knuckled the small of his back, kneading his spine, the rigid, knotted muscles of his quads, through his fleece-lined leathers. His oxygen mask on its rubber strap lay heavy upon his breast, a dead weight.

At thirty years of age, his body was that of a hale man twenty years his senior. His short, trim frame, all lean, pared muscle, bearing the wear of work. Taut hours spent cooped in the cockpit of his MetalHawk fighter, contorted by _g_ -forces, made men old before their time, despite diligent application, all the rigours of training and callisthenics intended to keep his body pliant and supple, in the way of good steel.

The Aramaellin caught his reflection, dim in the convex sheen of the Gate's plexiglass dome, marking a stranger. Shorn hair, iron-tinged, with the worn band his goggle-strap had furrowed, the _hadori,_ marking a man's pledge to fight the Shadow. His vocation, since he reached his majority, at the age of fifteen.

He owned a weathered countenance, hewn by the wind of high places. Almond eyes, bold in a a gaunt-hollowed face, sound as good teak. That distant gaze seared by conflagration, the imprint of the napalm clusters he sowed from above with a free hand. Crysanthemum blooms of amber fire that a man saw, even in his dreams.

Those eyes, guarded. Wary. Humanity, sensitivity, walled away, that he might do his work. Culan Cuhan had fashioned of himself a tool, mind and body. He was what his men needed him to be. That was all there was to it.

There was no glory to be found in his task. Only a long acquaintanceship with death. A familiarity engendered. The Aiel were right. Slaying even Shadowspawn marred a man's spirit and soul. Soiled hands and heart. The cost would come later, he knew. If he lived long enough to count it.

His gaze tracked over the scattered bodies. Here, at an open portal upon the threshold of the Gates of Hevan, sprawled the half-dismembered carcass of a ShivaSuit, like a butchered heron. Plucked limb from limb by hands both strong and savage. That was the only way to stop them, short of the One Power. Swarm them, drag them down, rive them apart to get at the pilots in their orbs, where they floated dreamless in the suspension of clear electro-amniotic fluid that seamlessly integrated man with machine. Cracking apart the hard carapace to get at the soft meat inside, like a fisherman shelling mussels.

The unbreakable _cuendillar_ limbs lay like clean-gnawed bones, an anatomy lesson, the articulation and hydraulic tendons between mangled and stripped. The raking talons of one of those long limbs, spurred with Power-wrought steel like a fighting-cock, embedded the body of a Myrddraal, staking the Eyeless to the ground.

Culan gave the Lurk a careful look. It was dead, but sometimes Myrddraal didn't let a little thing like that stop them flailing about.

The headless torso of the War Walker, mostly intact, was wedged deeply into a veritable hillock of assorted Shadowspawn. There was even a Darkhound corpse in there, Culan Cuhan noted with approbation, irreal in death. Living shadow pinned to an artist's canvas in stilled silhoutte by a blow from a Power-infused mace. Very little short of Balefire could kill a Darkhound. Nothing in his MetalHawk's arsenal could, that was for certain. Canister could rip one to shreds, and it would merely meld back together.

But Balefire was _forbidden_. There had been no armistice, no truce with the Shadow, but both sides had simply ceased using it after seeing the consequences. Reality mired in a snarl of broken causality as the Pattern snarled and yawed under the strain of cities being seared from the map.

One of the Lost women had somehow contrived to drag herself out of the pile, her left leg ending in a ragged stump below the knee. How she had managed that, the Light alone knew. Her fair skin was slicked in an afterbirth of blood and suspension fluid that was drying to a cracked gloss, the surface of an oil painting. She was slight, with severely-cropped ash-blonde hair that only served to offset a freckled, fine-boned face Culan would have deemed delicate, were her bared teeth not buried in the throat of a goat-headed Trolloc corpse.

The victorious Shadowspawn had not desecrated her body. Not out of respect, but most likely because, even dead, they were afraid to go anywhere near her.

 _You can burn them_ , men cautioned, speaking of the Lost Ones, _but walk wide around the ashes_.

Culan Cuhan shrugged off his thigh-length trenchcoat with the stiff red-and-white epaulettes of a Rodholder upon both shoulders. Once, they had been cause for pride. Increasingly, he felt their weight mounting. Pressing down upon him.

He knelt beside the stricken soldier, draping the threadbare garment over her. The old leather of the greatcoat was distressed, the stitching frayed on one sleeve, but the crane of the Air Cavalry, stencilled upon the back of the greatcoat in gold, yet flew serene over a crimson field. It was fitting.

Her stilled gaze, sapphire blue, was imbued with a restless rapture that made the Rodholder shiver.

Culan Cuhan peeled off his taut flight gloves of supple calfskin, folding them neatly over his bare forearm. Gently closed her eyes with the tips of his fingers.

 _May the last embrace of the Mother welcome you home, comrade._

He could only hope that had been the right thing to do, for all that her beliefs rejected a peace she no longer espoused.

Best he could do for her. Better than a death unmarked.

Culan was conscious that he was stalling, afraid to go further. To set foot under the transparent dome where the Shadow had been. His mouth fouled with the taste of it, even from afar. Putrefaction, the indescribable reek of offal exposed to the air. The sickly-sweet aroma of charred flesh rising above. He knew well enough what _that_ was. His gorge rose, as he gagged, affronted, stomach heaving _because_ of the obscene familiarity. It smelled so much like roast pork.

That was not the worst of it. Not by half. He could smell the violence. The acrid tang of fear. Feel it. His bones thrummed with that malign resonance, like a tuning fork, struck upon.

 _It should be black in there_ , Culan thought. _Black as Sheol._ But this was a darkness of the soul. He could see clearly enough, for all that. Would that he could not.

The courage of the Lost woman, a spur impelling him. Driving him in. He owed it to her, to bear witness. To all of them.

Culan armoured himself in the Oneness, drawing the Void about him. He would need it, where he was going. Bleak thoughts flickered around its edges, just out of eyesight, mocking him with false hope. _Perhaps they missed some. Perhaps somebody survived. Hiding. Else injured and bleeding out under a heap of dead._ Someone he could hope to help. An ember of life to bear out of Satelle. But in his true heart he knew it was not so.

 _Come and see,_ the Shadow beckoned, daring him to brave the night alone.

He slowly stood and entered.

Some time passed.

Culan Cuhan wandered the ghastly, gutted fane in wrack's aftermath. Numbed, and sere of eye.

Here was paradox. Or perhaps contradiction, giving the lie to the notion of souls: Man is mere flesh. Take, eat.

 _Come, see!_ The Shadow's voice, soft and rotten as mildewed calico, came from Culan's right hand. He turned, slowly. Heart lurching in his chest, blood frozen to black ice in his veins.

There was an ... apparition there, beside him. Seen out of the corner of his eye. There. Not there. Real, and not. He might have passed his hand through it.

A daguerrotype of humanity, slick under his gaze. A twisted reflection in some impossibly warped mirror, subtly misaligned with the world of light and life. Brought into being under his eye, a transubstantiation through blood and belief.

A Myrddraal, or the archetype of all Halfmen, turning to him. It moved with an assured deliberation, flowing _around_ reality, like a pool of quicksilver spilling over a lip. The dragging, inescapable quality of nightmare made flesh.

The Shadowman was a head taller than any Culan had ever seen, with its hanging-man cloak that no wind stirred the funereal sable of tarnish upon argent. A hue as much felt as seen, the soft, flaking texture of corruption under your fingers. Its blank-screaming face inclined gravely to him, avid gaze pinioning his.

 _The look of the Eyeless is fear_ , men said. Paralyzing its prey, as a weasel hypnotises a rabbit. But Culan felt nothing. He was empty of all. A vessel waiting to be filled.

 _I am Shaidar Haran,_ the Myrddraal told him. The voice, loud in his mind, bypassing his ears. _You will come with me._

 _The moving finger, writes; and having writ, moves on._ He was a blackboard, the Myrddraal, chalk scraping upon it. Splintered fingernails, bearing down, evoking a scream that bored a hole through the marrow of his soul.

 _Shaidar Haran._ Hand of the Dark. Myrddraal did not have names. Personalities. They were alike, one with another. Facsimilies of cruelty. But not this one. A thought Culan Cuhan registered in distant abstraction, the camera of ear and eye faithfully recording, mind still assimilating, an irrelevance, except the revenant before him. It was the realest thing he had ever experienced.

The Eyeless was beside him. It had not walked to him. It was simply _here_ , as it had been _there_ , without troubling with the intervening space, carpeted with ephemera just like him. Man made meat, a deconstructed dish laid out by an epicure. Dismembered corpses. A child's doll, headless, its smock bearing the whorls of one brief, bloodied fingerprint in snatched red exclamation. An upended Trolloc cookpot of dull black iron spilling grease-glistening stew in which a woman's hand floated, her ring finger stripped of meat by sharp teeth.

Obedient, Culan put out his own hand, trusting infant to an authoritative stranger, and Shaidar Haran took it. Took him. A sickening instant of deadweight and pressure, and Culan briefly shuddered, spasming in that grip.

 _Come,_ that voice bored into the space between his ears. _We have much to see._

Some time later, Culan paused under a _chora_. Shaidar Haran was gone, now, if that apparition had ever been there in the first place. His work done here. Culan Cuhan had not even noticed the Eyeless leave.

He had much to think upon.

Myrddraal had herded people out here. Dai'shain. They had.. They had stripped the white blossoms from the tree. All of them. Heaped the white trefoil flowers in an untidy, man-high pile. Or forced the Aiel to do it. Yes, that was more likely. A refined cruelty, forcing them to defile something they held sacred.

There were new blossoms upon the branches, now. New fruit.

Another pile beneath the tree, this one much larger, buzzed by lazy, glutted flies.

Aiel. You could hit an Aiel, and he would ask you how he offended. Beat him, and he would not raise so much as a finger to defend himself.

Culan Cuhan looked up. Seeking the heavens from the bowels of Sheol. Blood dripped slow upon his face. The dawn rent in slivers, rendered through a patchwork quilt, the gardens of vines stacked above intertwined with fat, glossy entrails, silken like a serpent's cast skin, draped in endless layers. Horror, heaped upon horror.

The dawn percolating down into these endless depths, a shepherd's warning, the concave top of the bowl above daubed bloody crimson with desperate handprints and obscene Trolloc glyphs. The forked trident of the Ko'bal, rendered in blood. The dagger-pierced skull of the Bhan'sheen smeared in excrement. As for the burning man of the She'dim…. Trollocs could be frighteningly literal at times.

Interspersing the semi-literate Black Speech of beasts, the vaunting of cruel beings that had once been men. Erudite Mryddraal script, in plainsong, prose and High Chant, a paean extolling the glories of Ba'alzemon, the bleak promise of dark prophecy.

Day, but no Light.

Humour is the unexpected juxtaposition of incongruities. So is horror. It was the _mindfulness_ of that ubiquitous violence that unmanned Culan Cuhan. Broke a hard man, as wrought iron is broken, by the sharp tap of a hammer.

Culan fell to his knees. His laughter, a scream. Tears streaming down his face.

His subordinates had to restrain him. Wrestle his heron-mark blade away from him, before he used it upon himself. The Rodholder tried to use it on them, then. Poorly, rudimentary hacking. The Blademaster couldn't even remember the most elementary forms. They'd disarmed him as simply as an unruly child. Bound his hands behind his back, treating him firmly but gently. They understood this malady. They had seen it many times before.

They burned the broken city behind them when they left. Reduced it thoroughly, leaving a glazed cairn of fused silica to mark where Satelle once stood.

After, Culan Cuhan had resigned his commission, Latra Posae remembered. His last act as a sober man. Wandered into the Blight to die, alone, in that most profound perversion of creation.

 _This is my garden,_ the broken man said, as he walked into the virulent green, its maw opening wide to devour him like a pitcher plant.

Latra sniffed dismissively. _Coward's way out_. The waste of a well-trained man of the sword, the grossest dereliction of duty imaginable.

Hope seemed to die that day, though. Would have, had it not been for the Dragon.

Latra Posae allowed herself a rueful grimace. Yes, it was the all-too-human failings of Lews Therin that had made him the most powerful advocate for the Light. To wit, his pig-headed obstinacy and refusal to budge!

Latra Posae had been his rival from the very beginning. They were opposites in every way. He was a young man born to privilege, cocksure and dashing. She had grown up a hiverat, a whore's get from the Pipes, the squalid subterranean underbelly of Satelle. Malnourished, feral, she had never seen the Sun, knowing only the groping, fitful light of neon tubes.

Then the Aes Sedai descended from the realm of fabled day to the labyrinth of caverns, testing for boys and girls born with the spark, and her life had changed irrevocably. Statuesque men and dazzling women who glowed where there was no light, picking through the human detritus with all the disdain of women combing for head-lice, lighting upon pallid Latra, slat-thin, sharp-sullen, with sudden wonder dawning upon those somehow ageless faces. Clucking over her at the same time, as though disappointed in her for the condition she found herself in.

They took her away with them. Latra had no choice in the matter. She hated them for that, the stripping-away of her autonomy, even though it was only the freedom to beg, sell her body, or starve in the clammy, frigid dark. But even in that honed hate, there was a new thought, shrewd. A bright and auspicious gleam. _They need what I have._ _I can use them, even as they use me._

And she had.

Latra Posae was already two hundred years old by the time that she first met Lews Therin. Life had taught her to watch her back, keep a tight fist on her credits, and to keep a sharp knife within easy reach. Lews by contrast had been affable, open and generous. The only similarities evident between them were their strength and genius in the One Power. That, and their political acumen.

They had disliked each other upon sight, and the diffidence and mistrust had only deepened with association over the years. Their animus had polarised the Hall, her _ajah_ representing the conservative faction over time coming to represent the female Servants of All, and Lews Therin's becoming dominated by male Aes Sedai.

The division along the lines of gender was unparalleled in history, if not downright antithetical. _Ajah_ usually coalesced around a theme, an informal gathering of Aes Sedai with a shared interest in a problem or cause. By their nature, they tended to be either short-lived or relatively small in number, or both. To have the Hall devolve into two opposing, militant political parties, divided along the lines of gender was disquieting, to say the least.

Appalled moderates on either side of the Hall had tried for a hundred years to arrest the worrying trend, but by then the mistrust was inculcated, a dark seed germinating. The cruel irony at its heart was the pioneering work carried out by Latra Posae and Lews Therin – their only collaboration, and their greatest achievement.

Together, they had worked out the mechanics of linking to form circles, and to grow circles beyond the principal prime of thirteen women by adding male Aes Sedai. They had also discovered some very unsavoury .. possibilities. Secrets that they had both agreed to Seal to the Seat, about linking with others against their will, based upon their research into the Ring of Tamyrlin.

The twisted ring appeared to be formed of black jet, and it was surprisingly heavy. It was the symbol of the T'amyrlin Seat, the First Among Servants. By custom older than law, it was never worn on the T'Amyrlin's finger, but around his neck on a silver chain.

The Ring of Tamyrlin was the oldest known created object in existence, and one of the strangest. For the Ring was both _angreal_ and _ter'angreal_. In the first instance, it was a mighty _angreal_ for both men and women, allowing either _saidin_ or _saidar_ to be channelled.

The second property, known to few, was the reason it was never worn, and seldom used. Its wielder could co-opt a linked circle, if the bearer was close enough to the one who directed the flows. Supposedly, the Ring of Dominion had been created by the first man and woman who had ever learned to channel. And currently, it was worn by Lews Therin Telamon, strongest of the strong.

Glowing with pride, the duo published the sanitized version of their findings, thinking only of the wonderful vista of opportunities their work had opened up. The circles allowed the wielding of truly astonishing quantities of the Power, with a control, sophistication and dexterity that was undreamed-of. Men and women, working together with the Power to do things undreamed of… What fools they had been, the pair of them.

Before, men and women who channelled were regarded as roughly equal, with a few caveats. The theory of working with _saidin_ and _saidar_ had diverged. The two halves of the One Power were held to be incongruent. The rules that applied to working with _saidar_ just didn't hold when applied to the male half of the Power, and vice versa. What the two of them had discovered suggested a structure, and a primacy about the use of the One Power, which in turn caused a number of disquieting theological questions about the relative place of men and women, and the Creator's intent regarding the use of the One Power.

Latra Posae pursed her lips dismissively as she considered _that_ nonsense. The upshot had been mutual mistrust between men and women Aes Sedai fostered by paranoia about what the linking process entailed, particularly about who controlled the Great Circles. Some fools held it a point of doctrine that men and women should be equally able to control a circle of any size and composition, regardless of the evidence to the contrary.

Latra had been very glad that they'd at least had the common-sense to bury the darker fruits of their labours. Those might have seen them stilled and executed.

Never forget the Law Of Unintended Consequences. Two of the 'bridge-builders' – a male Aes Sedai, Beidomon Abernathy, and a female Aes Sedai named Mierin Eronaille – had sought to find a way whereby men and women could channel an undivided Power. It would heal the divide between men and women who could channel, and usher in a new era.

Of course, the idea itself was nothing new. Every girl or boy who began to channel had the same notion, and were rudely – and sometimes terminally – disabused of the notion that the two halves of the Power were anything alike. For example, a man could pull heat out of an object and transfer it to another. If a woman tried the same thing, she would spontaneously self-combust. Even when the Power was used to do similar things – to Travel, for example – the process was radically different.

Before she herself was born, it had been mathematically proved that _saidin_ and _saidar_ were themutually-orthogonal forces driving _ta'maral'ailen_ , the Weave of the Pattern. The work she had done with Lews Therin was a practical demonstration of the fact, as well as the implied corollary, that the two forces were _meant_ to work together, in harness, for maximal efficacy. The force-multipliers showed that beyond all doubt, did they not? Well. What was done was done.

Anyway, Beidomon was a strange wisp of a fellow, who preferred the confines of pen and paper to the coruscating surge of the Power within him. He had the prescience to ask a different question, one nobody else had thought to ask: What if there was another Power, a _third_ Power that both men and women alike could use? He had been derided for this, of course. On the surface, it was a ridiculous supposition. Pure conjecture.

Stung by their mockery, he had withdrawn to his rooms in a draughty attic, and remained incommunicado for months. His only contact with the outside world was through his faithful manservant, a taciturn Da'shain Aiel. A year passed. Then he emerged into the light, waving a sheaf of papers under the nose of his detractors. He had done it, he said. Mathematical proof that a third power, a True Power existed to be tapped. "Look, you fumblers! Read the damn paper. It's bloody well there!"

"Show us some concrete proof, then" had been the consensus of a vexed and somehow browbeaten Hall of the Servants, who had no wish to try and wade through a hundred-page dissertation in Beidomon's spidery scrawl, written in the abstract language of Lie Groups. On actual _paper_ , of all things! What in the Light was wrong with a simple eDocument published to the Cloud, with permissions Sealed to the Hall?

At least the convocation was quorate. Barely. Half the Sitters were present – in person as stipulated, but there were many empty chairs amongst the shawled Aes Sedai ranks in the middle and upper concourses of the ovoid amphitheatre. Even many of those attendees were present only in holographic form, opaque projections that cast no shadow under the ambient no-light produced by standing flows of the One Power illuminating the Hall of the Servants.

Lews Therin himself bore a rumpled look that suggested he'd slept in his clothes far away from his quarters to avoid being accosted by the theorist!

Deferential Dai'shain attendents in gray livery with the Fang and Flame insignia proud upon their breast, wove deft between the empty chairs and 'through' the holographically present to bring snacks and hot and cold beverages to the seated Aes Sedai

Some of the 'electronic attendees' were 'e-nulled' – fuzzed outlines elliptic curve key-encrypted to conceal their identity from prying eyes. A common practice of late, Latra Posae reflected with distaste, for those who wished to observe without being observed. But at least outsider, no wilder, would be able to eavesdrop in this fashion. Their presence here, prohibited by custom and law. The identity of every Aes Sedai was stored on the Cloud, their ePresent holographic image the uplinked projection of a secure data stream where the individual's private key was a function of the Fourier transform of their _ara'i_ – the unique energy signature of each channeller.

The Cloud. The summation of humanity's knowledge, and the infrastructure supporting it. Exponentially expanding, self-aware – and transient. Nothing written down, nothing stored, and nothing backed-up. Humanity's knowhow, a stratospheric Tower of Babel, all enabled by technology that nobody truly understood.

That technology, something to be used and exploited, a landscape to become lost in, a building whose original blueprints had long since been mislaid, the whole architecture riddled with backdoors, secret passages, minefields and sudden dead-ends. The underpinning axioms of information themselves bearing the scars of errors built upon and untruths maliciously introduced by hackers and anarchists of every stripe. A structure that nobody was able to erect from first principles, patched and patched again like a gleeman's cloak. The foundations below lost from sight, beneath the clouds, load-bearing support girders groaning under the accumulated weight.

A person's memories might be their own. The information they depended on, that their minds accessed via neural synaptic links, all cloud-stored and communally owned. The inferences and the use they put that acquired knowledge to would be an individual's own intellectual property, but the reservoir of data, a trove held in common. For the most part. A vast database of knowledge, countless trillions of lives, on tap, freely available to all.

That more than compensated for the flawed, unwieldy information infrastructure, and provided the robustness the Cloud needed. An open-source knowledge base, which self-pruned and self-regulated, which patched its own bugs, identified its own limitations and gaps, and filled them. Researchers, such as those at the prestigious Collam Daan, were instrumental in advancing progress, but a indefatigable army of billions of people all did their modest part, often by nothing more than idly querying some obscure 'fact', and highlighting errata online.

There was one unavoidable, implicit problem.

Nothing was concrete. Nothing was built to last. Pioneers at the gleaming cutting-edge of research were fractal outcroppings of academe, yearning stalagmites reaching ever higher even as they drew increasingly further apart, one from another. Experts in increasingly rarified disciplines of research, increasingly unable to comprehend each other, let alone inform the ignorant laity, whose lives of indolent leisure were enabled and enfeebled by the technocracy they embraced.

The whole edifice top-heavy, teetering, and ripe for its inevitable fall. If it ever collapsed, _nothing_ tangible would remain. Vague conceptions only, even in the minds of the learned. Ephemera. Impressionistic paintings instead of a botanist's sketches. Metaphors about vehicle maintenance instead of a mechanic's manual. Without the data reservoir, many fine minds would be stranded, remembering little of their academic pursuits. All their vocabulary and trained intellect remaining intact, but their residual knowledge, scattered islands, with too few cognitive bridges to make sense of the whole ensemble.

That was the trouble with standing upon the shoulders of giants.

The sculpted terraces of the Hall of the Servants canted sharply downwards, the foreswept wings of the Dove of Peace, enfolding. Row upon row of robed figures precipitously overhanging the speaker's roster, where it faced the Tamyrlin Seat, standing proud upon its plinth of black basalt under the eyes of the Light. This conformation, optimising seating and proximity to the speaker, an impossibility with traditional building materials, was enabled by maglev technology, as was the 'artificial gravity' preventing the Aes Sedai toppling from their niches onto the floor far below. The scaffoldless concourse, delicate feathers of _cueran_ – commonly known as 'plasteel' – was in truth neither plastic nor steel, formed of long-chain silicon polymers, far stronger than either and comparatively inexpensive. Humanity had been long since weaned from its dependance upon crude oil.

Change was ever painful, bringing death, hardship and eventually innovation.

Ribbed pillars of the same matt-white _cueran_ tapered to their asymptotic limit fathoms above, the space between the pillars spanned by a taut melding of flowmetal, the mercury-gallium sculpting a four-dimensional dynamic painting, Merishelle Telyn Moerelle's 'Fall of Man'. Stark black and white, sere lines of chalk, brimming oils and sleek sable ink melding and flowing, growing, writhing, living and finally dying as the tale wove itself onwards to its inevitable conclusion, of unrelieved black.

An evocation of an age of wonders – and a warning. There was a starkness that approached bathos in that cadenza. An acnowledgement of the futility of life.

It had been an age of mythology, a time when the rival states of Moskva and Merica had brought humanity to the brink of the cosmos. An epoch of fable. Hlenn of the Strong Arm, aided by the sun-God Apollo, planting the Red, White and Blue standard of Merica on the Moon, bearing their banner across the airless wastes of sky. A constellation of stars and the proud red bars of the Rodholder claiming another world for all eternity.

An impossibility – except Latra Posae had seen the proof of it with her own eyes, using a lens of the One Power. The becalmed banner, bleached almost white, hanging eerily motionless, flying forever over the breathless black basalt of the Tranquil Sea.

An age of hubris. Humanity had not managed to outrun its prediliction for antagonism, animalistic rutting and posturing. Tribalism. The causes of war long forgotten, but not the names of the protagonists. A Queen, Aelsibeth Regina, and two statesmen (Kings?), bearing the unlikely names (or were they titles? Sobriquets?) of 'The Donald', and Wladimir Putin.

 _The past is a strange country,_ reflected Latra Posae. _They do things differently, there._

Those infamous names would never fade, however. Nor the memory of the weapons of mass destruction with which they made good upon their threats. Thermobaric lances arcing halfway around the world, and the spreading mushroom clouds that followed in their wake, welling up black and bilious as squid-ink. The crematorium pall of ashes blotting out the Sun for two long Ages.

Weapons changed, age by age, but Mankind did not. The horrors of 'nukular missiles', repudiated, disavowed forever by men of reason, the secrets of their fabrication lost in time, only to be replaced by those of genetic manipulation and information technology.

The arcane labours that had allowed the survivors to emerge from the radioactive ashes of Armageddon, the ceaseless striving to master the secrets of the human genome and sculpt a new David from the lumpen block of humanity, had awakened a latent potential in Man that nobody truly understood. The One Power. An ability to tap into the forces that gave directionality to the universe itself – the arrow of entropy and time that pointed from past to future, and an innate quality of the human spirit and will.

The One Power. Presenting a far greater potential for devastation than any 'nukular missile', any genetically engineered virus or memetic plague.

"Have you even _read_ the abstract? …Why do I even bother?!" Beidomon Abernathy barked across the Hall with all the injured dignity of a vexed wheaten terrier, knuckles whitening on the lectern as perspiration raised a sheen on the crown of his bald head. "Look. The Pattern's a manifold. A Lie Group, and the Powers you know are in its tangent space. Its Lie Algebra… which acts upon it…"

Confronted with a sea of blank faces, the Keeper of the Ninth Repository sighed, ponderously, exasperated, and was about to roll up his papers and storm off in dudgeon, when something happened. An innocuous moment that changed the course of the Pattern forever, bringing incalculable sorrow in its wake.

Beidomon noticed a young woman in the front row. Very young indeed, very tall and extravagantly beautiful, a fact not lost upon the scholar. There was an imperious, even haughty cast to her face, high cheekbones, face as white as ivory. Dark, deep eyes that were somehow ageless. She wore no cosmetics, nor stood in need of such augmentation. Hair like a raven's wing, lips as red as the raven's blood.

The dark-haired woman was simply, though becomingly, clad, a dress of multi-layered white streith that hinted at the intimate hue of a woman's body beneath without explicitly revealing it, and her only adornment was the Great Serpent ring on her finger. Very young to be a full Aes Sedai.

She was scribbling away with a stylus on the fuzzed outline of a hPage hanging in front of her, a holographic tablet securely uplinking her notes with the Cloud, whilst simultaneously recording audio and video of Beidomon's lecture, the tablet parsing both speech and text, memetically searching for appropriate references for elucidation and further research by context.

Taking notes, by the Light! The only one out of all those gathered there.

As Beidomon faltered, she looked up from her writing and gave him an apologetic smile, and a thumbs-up, apparently eager to hear him continue. _Very well,_ mused the scholar, and his anxiety and even his defensive abrasiveness was alleviated. _An audience of one is better than no audience at all._

Invigilating the lectern in front of him, Beidomon quickly called up the information on the young Aes Sedai, facial recognition software instantly identifying her as Mierin Eronaille. Beidomon called her down to him, for all the world like a magician's assistant, and wonder of wonders she came, with none of the coltish self-consciousness the scholar had come to expect from the artless young. Nor was the brief interlude a trial for the assembly, the comely young woman's gliding progress followed with much male admiration, not to mention female envy.

As Mierin Eronaille reached the lip of the terrace, liquid SmartMetal accreated before her, pooling out from below the balustrade into a step that formed a level outcropping, and hardened under her assured stride. Not the One Power at work, but more magnetic levitation technology. Quicksilver runnels of the mercury alloy streamed around the edges of the newly-formed platform to form the next, and then the next.

As she approached the floor, the courteous academic offered a gracious arm, which Mierin accepted with the assurance of a woman taking no more than her due. The mercury stairway immediately liquefied behind her, pooling and rolling back into the well in the balcony whence it had issued, impelled by powerful electromagnets.

Beidomon – or Mierin at least – had their attention. The Keeper intended to keep it, continuing with greater assurance. "Ok. The Age Lace for Dummies. Think of it as a piece of paper, or cloth. May I?

The fastidious scholar held out a hand to Mierin, and she produced a neatly-folded and – he was relieved to find – clean handkerchief. "This is your Pattern – time and space. This representation is limited and misleading in many respects, but it will serve for now. Care to help me hold it tight, my dear?" he addressed Mierin.

They each took two corners, holding the cloth taut. From his pocket, Beidomon produced a couple of cheap glass marbles and put them onto the surface, where their weight produced circular indentations. "As you can see, mass – and energy – distort the Age Lace. For energy, think a strong _ta'veren,_ or perhaps a singularly strong localised usage of the power – a bunch of you bright young things fooling around with a shiny new _sa'angreal,_ say."

He smiled, avuncular. "Here's the thing. To a limited extent, one can measure the curvature and evolution of the Pattern. Only as a local phenomenon, true – it would take a concerted effort by numerous observers to make an affine chart to cover a truly representative piece of the Pattern.

Yet even at a local level, the curvature coefficients are wrong by a whole order of magnitude! The Pattern appears to be _far_ more undulating than it should be. And what that tells us is that there is a hidden source of energy – let's call it 'dark energy' because we haven't discovered how to detect it yet! – distorting both space and time. Inference into its properties tells us it is of 'one flavour'. Meaning both men and women should be able to channel this new Source."

For the first time, Beidomon ventured an apologetic smile. "I know, there's a very obvious question. If it's there, how can we detect it? And even if we can detect it, how do we know we can channel it? As a thought experiment, I think I could tender a guess as to the answer to the first question.

Returning to my little illustration, if you have a single marble, it distorts space and time. Add a second, and they will tend to gravitate towards each other. Of course, this is a flat representation of a many-dimensional problem. If these marbles represent celestial bodies they may orbit each other, or …" He waved a hand. "Doesn't matter. Just trying to give you a flavour of the subject. I have observed that the curvature coefficient varies quite a lot in different places. Anyone want to venture a guess why?"

"I think I know" Mierin ventured, unusually diffidently for such a forceful young woman. "The big discrepencies from the background are going to be where you see a lot of day-to-day high-energy use of the One Power. Such as the research centre at the Collam Daan, where _angreals_ and _sa'angreals_ are in everyday use, and Aes Sedai and Initiates practice linking…." She started as she realised what he was driving at "Light! _We're_ the first marble. And our pull has drawn the source of the 'dark energy' to us. If there's anywhere in the world where it might be possible to tap into it, it has to be right under our very feet!"

Beidomon nodded appreciatively. _Beautiful, and what a mind!_ "Exactly. One might say that the Collam Daan is a 'thin place' in the fabric of the Pattern, where the fibers have been stretched, and the 'distance' between us and the 'dark energy' is minimized.

It should be possible to bore a hole through the pattern 'here', creating a link to the dark energy. I daresay it will require a non-negligible expenditure of Power to make the Bore, but well within the sort of tolerances that a good-sized circle or a reasonable _sa'angreal_ can produce."

A hand arose. It was Lews Therin, lolling indolent in his curule Seat. "Boring a hole in the Pattern sounds a tad… dangerous to me. Maybe even reckless. … Might we not pop our universe like a bladder filled with air in the attempt?"

Beidomon shrugged, brightening. "A good question. Depends rather a lot on how much one trusts the mathematics behind the standard model of the multiverse. Or at least, this sheaf of it, anyway. Shouldn't have to worry about a 'black hole' opening up and sucking our world into it like a child drinking lemonade through a straw, anyway. I'd say we would be fine, really.

Look, holes in the Pattern happen all the time. When people die. Especially a married couple, for some reason. When some muttonhead starts waving Balefire around like a party-favour. Balefire's nasty stuff, and it can snarl up the Pattern something awful. This is nothing by comparison, believe me. The process I envisage is a lot more analogous to that of making a Gateway. No, all we have to worry about is the opposite. Handling the power once we breach it. A 'white hole' pouring a deluge of raw energy into our world is the worst likely eventuality."

A man stood up, beside Lews Therin, dressed head to toe in funereal black, with a sober and serious mein. Beidomon blinked. It was the young theologian Elan Morin Tedronai. Before his retreat, the young philosopher had been a man of cheerful stamp, one of the few who actively sought his company.

Now he looked haggard, gaunt. The bruised hollows under his eyes were testament to lack of sleep. But the man's eyes themselves… They were raw with a sorrow that had weighed upon him, fact upon remorseless fact, night upon wretched night until his despair had quelled the light in his spirit. Beidomon did not understand the cause of Elan's affliction, but from his own experience, he recognised the other man's obsession. Elan Morin had found a problem so intractable he couldn't leave it alone, couldn't think about anything else.

There was a raw edge in the young man's voice. "Have you considered the possibility that this energy, this Force is sentient?"

Beidomon essayed a laugh, which fell somewhat short of convincing. "Light, lad… No. I hadn't considered it. But then you know that I am an old heretic, unconvinced of the existence of either the Creator or his Shadow" he offered, puckishly. "Really, they should take me out back and put me down. Be a kindness to all concerned!"

"Then it is high time you consider it." Elan replied brusquely, dismissing the olive-branch of humour Beidomon tendered. "Because if you're wrong, it won't be the Creator you shall find. My philosophy tells me He stands outside his creation, not integral within it. And I don't need to measure the curvature of the Age Lace to observe the Dark One's touch on our world.

I see the inescapable certainty of Death, and the suffering that lies between. I hear the bright song of the innocent choked and cut short by the hand of the malevolent. Creation marred by sickness and plague and pestilence the One Power cannot heal."

There were angry tears in Elan's eyes, and his voice thickened with emotion. "Creation is a pocket-watch winding down. Everything subject to Entropy's heavy hand. We use and reuse the ingredients – the same tall tales and stories recycled until they become unrecognisable, or become their own antithesis."

His eyes, distant, raged across the endless theme above that cycled endlessly, inevitably into the black. White pastel smears rising, as megaton nukes ravaged cities, sky-scraping towers of boxy glass and steel falling inwards in shards about the mounting pyre, the ground convulsing in concentric ripples, propagating as though the land was ocean. A restless, endless whirlpool.

Elan's voice, quiet, when next he spoke. Almost gentle. "Moskva and Merica, with their lances of fire that could reach around the world, and their war with Aelsibeth, Queen of All… What passes for virtue in one generation derided as folly in the next, until all that is good is watered down, erased, abnegated, corrupted, _lost_!"

Elan's voice rising to a scream of pain. Lews Therin rose, seeking to place a comforting arm upon his friend's shoulder. Elan Morin struck the arm away with a clenched fist. "I neither seek nor require comfort" he snarled into Lews Therin's face, with the ferocity of a hungry hound that has a bone torn from between its possessive jaws.

With a frisson of alarm, Beidomon saw that Elan held _saidin,_ his _ara'i_ an unstable stormfront. The air crackled with the potential for weaves.

"Comfort is for _children_! For the weak who cannot find accommodation with reality!…."

Elan paused, drew a long, shuddering breath, and with an effort, released the Power, regaining control. There were not a few relieved faces amongst the male Aes Sedai, and the females who had intuited that Elan Morin had seized _saidin_ in his passion.

Beidomon mopped sweat from his brow with Mierin's handkerchief. _Light, Elan is as strong as Lews Therin himself. If he'd started lashing about with the Power… He wouldn't have, surely. Not really. He can't be that unhinged. Can he?_

Face a cold mask of correctness, Elan Morin turned, offering a courtly bow to Beidomon. "I apologise, Theorist. That was no proper question. For me, make your Bore with my blessing. If you find the Dark One, and he shatters the world, maybe it is for the best. I wonder if even _that_ will be sufficient incentive for the Creator to deign to step down from his throne and mend his handiwork. And if the world ends… with it, an end to questions."

Time had passed. Beidomon's symposium and Elan Morin's outburst had been memorable for a time, but with no practical steps being taken in accessing the fabled 'True Power', interest had faded. There was one noteworthy change, though. Beautiful Mierin, and unworldly Beidomon were spending a lot of time together. 'Knocking boots', as one wag would have it.

A surprised Beidomon found himself roughly hailed by the younger male Aes Sedai and their prentices, who were amused and more than a little impressed at what they perceived to be his conquest. Who would have thought the old man had so much ram in his rod? "Arr gerrup ye bad man ye!" he was hailed by one uncouth Initiate hailing from the Sand Hills overlooking the inland Andor Sea. Beidomon suffered the ragging with a sort of good-humoured bemusement.

Of course, the academic fended off any direct insinuations about what he and Mierin might be up to. "She's a proper lady, young man, and I won't hear a word otherwise. And we are just friends and colleagues." The rumour was ludicrous, impossible, risible – and so of course it was believed everywhere, lampooned, until one brave or foolish man broached the subject with Lews Therin himself, who was known to be her former lover.

"Mierin Eronaile" the Lord of the Morning had replied starchily "desires only that which will gain her power. I only hope that, whatever the arrangement Beidomon has with her, that he finds some satisfaction in it. For you may rely upon it, gentle Mierin needs no help in looking out for herself."

Beidomon had been right. The girl that had become the Forsaken, Lanfear, had the mechanical aptitude and intuitive brilliance with the Power to devise the weave for the Bore based upon Beidomon's mathematics.

It had been a terrible success. Black fire had consumed the Collam Daan university campus and the sphere of the Sharom that had hung suspended above it by the Earth's geomagnetic field. At first, it had seemed that Beidomon's worst fears had been justified, and that a white hole had been wrenched ajar in the heart of the city of V'saine.

The rest of the city was evacuated, and the world waited with bated breath to see if the nexus of lethiferous, hungry energy would continue to expand, consuming everything in its path. It finally halted, leaving a matt-black spherical phenomenon a mile across that radiated heat and intermittent arcs of crackling energy but appeared to be otherwise stable.

Beidomon muttered something about expected mass and event horizon radius, appearing appeased and relieved in equal measure.

Then it had turned out that it was Elan Morin that had the right of it after all, when the Dark One began to speak.

The first person to hear his voice had been Beidomon, as he worked outside the Bore, measuring the black-body radiation emanating from it, desperately trying to quantify the tragedy he had wrought in any currency other than human lives.

The next morning, he was found dead by his servant, with the veins of his wrists slashed open, silent screams of expiation.

His normally cluttered desk had been cleared, and laid out neatly upon it was the first page of his thesis, complete with the diagram of the Bore upon it that Mierin had sketched in her lacy, looping hand. He must have figured it was all the suicide note he needed. Poor Beidomon.

As for Mierin, well, her greatest triumph had become her blackest shame. All the work, the preparation she and Beidomon had carried out in their secret art to do something so audacious nobody else had even contemplated it, an act of metaphysical intellectual brilliance and prowess in the One Power beyond anything hitherto attempted! She should have been feted, lauded rewarded. The coveted third name that had been hitherto denied her by the envy of others because of her 'youth', her 'impetuosity' should have been a mere formality.

Instead, she had been censured in the Hall of the Servants by her former lover Lews Therin. It had been the most ignominious day of her life. She had come within a hair of being stripped of her stole and ring, of being fined. Maybe imprisoned. She received those things – which were hers by right! – as a gift from the man whose withering words had dismissed her, had castigated her in front of the Assembly of the Hall. The man who had spurned her. And for what, pray?

She had not failed. She had succeeded beyond anyone's expectations! There had been collateral damage – a few people had died, less than a thousand all told – and some trifling destruction of property. What of it? All advances in the Power had come with people hazarding their own lives and the lives of others to ascertain the limits of what was possible!

One thing was for sure. On that day, Mierin Eronaile decided she would no longer be an Aes Sedai. But she would take what she was owed. It had been a day that nobody who was there to witness ever forgot.

Lews Therin leaned forward, looking down on her from that ostentatious throne down the bridge of his aquiline nose.

No slouching from the Dragon. No thumbing of an earlobe to indicate a man's frank appraisal of a beautiful woman. Lews Therin was all cool, sterile poise, drawn up haughty in judgement, his long-boned frame draped by the sombre angles of a high-collared Tzorii coat in charcoal weave. Winter frost fringed the burnt senna of his hair, riming him august with years.

His carriage imbued with all the implicit entitlement of the Bloodborn. More than that. An apex predator's self-assurance. Here was a man who acknowledged no equal.

Latra Posae's mouth tightened. For a brief moment she felt a moiety of pity for the accused. She quelled that with a heavy hand. The fool woman should _burn_ for what she did!

"Mierin Eronaile Aes Sedai, the Hall of The Servants have reached a verdict."

Despite herself, the raven-haired woman thrilled at Lews Therin's voice. A soft breeze, playing upon the taut wire strings of a harp to evoke a familiar refrain. The mirrored skim of Aes Sedai composure, fresh and clear as a mountain lake, palpably rippling.

True sentiment, or feigned, nuanced inflection to elicit fond reminiscence? Latra Posae conceded either was possible with this woman.

Lews Therin was _saidin_ itself. The unmoved mover.

"Through the reckless and wilful endangerment of the lives of others, you occasioned the deaths of some nine hundred and twenty-seven persons, including many of your colleagues who once stood among us. We have heard the plea of your advocate, and the Hall is satisfied that the actions of yourself and your colleague were not undertaken from the desire to do harm.

We therefore find no grounds to impeach you for manslaughter, only of the lesser charge of reckless endangerment leading to death by misadventure, which gives this august body a greater degree of latitude regarding your sentencing.

Your youth is the principal mitigating factor in the assessment of this case, but against it, we must also weigh your statements in this court after the fact, which show a disquieting absence of empathy. Not a single time have you expressed remorse, or even made a statement of sympathy towards your victims. Instead, you have conducted yourself as if the main consequences of your ill-fated experiment were the inconvenience to your person and rights, and the ramifications towards your career."

The Lord of the Morning paused, the deliberate cadence of a blademaster taking guard. Eyes the buffed grey of banded agate measured the accused for the sword-stroke. That gaze held daunting weight. Long years of experience, bearing down heavy.

"Mierin Eronaille, you have earned the right to the ring and the shawl, a not inconsiderable accomplishment at any age, but you gained both as the youngest ever to take your place amongst our number. That attests not just to your strength and skill in the Power, but to the fortitude of your spirit and commendable coolness under pressure. But being Aes Sedai is more than a matter of puissance and hardihood. Perhaps we allowed you to test for the shawl too young, were you ready or no.

No matter. An Aes Sedai you stand, an Aes Sedai you shall be judged.

As First Among Servants, it is my burden to pass sentence upon you under the Light and according to the law.

Mierin Eronaille Aes Sedai, I find you _wanting_. Wanting in grace, in compassion, in shouldering the burden of care. Your actions have injured and shamed us all.

In your pride and zeal for personal advancement you chose to endanger the lives of many innocents, contrary to the Law. As a consequence, many of these people are dead. Men, women and children. Whole families, Mierin! It is something you will have to carry with you all the days of your life.

I sentence you to six months of penance, allotted to you for contemplation. In this time, it is our hope that you come to terms with what you have done and accept responsibility for it.

The work chosen for you shall not be arduous or demeaning, but fitted to reflection. You shall make weekly appointments with our resident psychologist, Kamarile Maradim Nindar, which will be mandatory. It is my hope that you will not see these sessions as additional punishment, but as a genuine attempt to reach you."

Mierin Eronaille stiffened frostily. Passion inlimned in that willowy frame, her dignity, a stole drawn tight about her, onyx eyes fixed upon those of the Dragon. In them was only the frankness of anger.

"It is my belief, Mierin, that a person is not born heartless, or empty of all save pride and ambition. I think that the rude hand of circumstance has fashioned you so, but that it does not have to be this way. You can choose. The help is there. I strongly suggest you take it. Have you anything you wish to say on record?"

The woman in silver and white drew herself up. "Yes, Lews Therin _Telamon_ , I have something to say." Her voice was thrilling, melodic. "You were not nearly so concerned about my tender youth when you pursued me like a tom cat in heat. Oh, Lews Therin, you were so punctiliously _correct_ about it all, waiting until my eighteenth name-day before taking me to your bed. How virtuous you were – and you a mature man of two hundred and five, no less!"

Her argent voice, swift in rebuke, curt as a handprint upon cheek.

"But how many kisses had you stolen before that, Lews Therin? And did any of my peers have any other choice but to withdraw whatever suit they may have had for me, once you made your intentions for me known. How could they have contended with the great Lews Therin Telamon?"

Mierin laughed with a brittle gaiety. "Ah, Lews, I didn't mind. You could have had me any time since I turned sixteen. I was the low-hanging pear ripe to be stolen! But your seeming virtue is a vehicle for your ego. You wanted me, but you wanted more to be seen as honourable and upstanding. Your nobility is a whitewashed tomb, containing only corruption and old bones!

Where was your concern for what you see as my wounded soul when we lay together, hip to hip? Did you see me as a child then? I make no apology for bringing my complaint against you, personal as it is.

You could have – should have – recused yourself from judging my case. The whole _world_ knows we were lovers, Lews Therin. You shame me in open court by speaking as to my sanity, intimating personal things that you only guess at. Just couldn't resist the attention, could you? The chance to dispense justice and mercy upon an old flame, leaving all the beholders seeing you as charitable and gentle. _Tsag!_

Let me put you straight. You know my body, because I have shared it with you. You know my heart likewise. I loved you then. I love you now. My past is my past. I do not share it with anyone, because it does not interest me to dwell upon it.

For me, my life began when I first saw you, in the orchard. If you wish to caricaturise me as a fallen woman, or as some pitiful victim in order to preserve the way you see yourself, your _dignitas,_ I won't be made party to it.

I _know_ you, Lews Therin. And you know me. You're ambitious. Ruthless. Manipulative! You cannot bear to lose – and you turn every relationship into a contest. Impulsive. Just like me! What I did to create the Bore was something you might have tried – if you'd had the wit. Admit it! And I daresay in your long life, you will do something that brings just as great a surfeit of grief.

Here's real love. What pains me is that you gave that up – _me_ up – for what? Not Ilyena herself. You sacrificed me to the all-encompassing narrative. Not Lews Therin the man, but to Lews Therin Telamon, the legend. And Ilyena fits that fairy-tale far better than I. That milk-and-honey disposition matching her milk-water face, insipid blonde hair and her vapid little mind.

She is an _ornament_. A trophy wife. A pretty porcelain doll. And if you're honest, she's an insurance policy in case you misstep and it all comes crashing down about your ears. Family, connections, money. But she'll never challenge you. Never be your equal. She'll hide away from herself all the darkness, cruelties and conceits that are part of you whether you will it or no. Fantasy on both sides.

Whereas I darkle. I tinct. I frighten you – and myself sometimes. But I will never lie to you about myself. For I am ashamed of nothing I have done. You can have that too. Always and forever."

She smiled then, and it was a wicked smile, sharp and sweet as a briar and its fruit. Its full seductive force was directed at Lews Therin, but its effect was not lost upon any that were there that day. Ordinarily, Mierin was not given to outward displays of emotion. She took care to appear serious-minded, grave, dispassionate. Even her anger was cold. This was a _woman._

Mierin's smile only widened when she caught Ilyena's pinched and possessive face glaring back at her. Sunhair's blue eyes were arctic with anger.

Mierin's frigid fury overtopped it. A glacier carving its path clear, wild and untamed as _saidar_ itself.

 _Come at me, then, if you dare, ye chit,_ her eyes daunted her rival. _Try to take what you claim. I will teach you the meaning of sorrow!_

Mierin was almost done. There was but one more thing to say. It had been a decision her mind had played with restlessly, a cat with a ball of yarn.

Slowly, and with dignity, she unfastened the shoulder-clasp on her shawl, the pure white stole of cloth that every Aes Sedai woman wore. Beneath it she wore a long, sweeping dress of virgin white silk, with a high collar. Holding the shawl out in front of her she released it to fall upon the floor with a contemptuous snap of her wrists.

"What is the meaning of this?" a thoroughly-affronted Lews Therin demanded. It was a breach of protocol in interrupting the Accused's final words after sentencing, but her inflammatory words had goaded him past enduring.

"Why, only that I have no further use for it." Mierin replied coolly. Plucking the Great Serpent ring from her finger, she tossed it underhand towards the T'amyrlin Seat, dismissively.

In the silence, she heard the heavy gold band rattle and clatter away under the benches until it was lost from her sight. She heard the collective indrawn breath of a hundred Aes Sedai. _Good._ To these stuffed shirts, these men of straw, what she had done had been nigh unto blasphemy.

Once, the Great Serpent Ring had been her most prized possession. Now it was nothing to her. Less than nothing. "I do not need these playthings, nor do I desire your fellowship. From this day forward, I am no Aes Sedai. And I scorn all those who style themselves so.

You are all beneath my contempt, a puling bunch of pious hypocrites. I am stronger, shrewder and better than any of you, and like a fool I gave you my fealty, hoping that you would give me my deserts.

Well, I was a child then, to believe that you would do other than envy and fear me, denying me advancement at every turn. But that child has grown, and put away childish things. And I have come to understand that there is nothing within your gift that I cannot take for myself. Even the Ring of Tamyrlin itself if I took a mind. But fear not, Lews Therin – you may keep your bauble. I need it not!

For now, I only want but one thing. That which I am owed. The third name that you would withhold from me, I will grant myself, according to the works of my art."

To Latra Posae's intent gaze, a penumbra of shadow appeared to gather about the former Aes Sedai. An impossibility, of course, under the steady illumination of ambient light.

Yet it was so. A nimbus of annihilation crowning the other woman, the negation of _saidar_ 's halo.

In bleak counterpoint to the waxing dark, Mierin Eronaille seemed to .. sharpen. Come into keen focus. A white, lucent flame, attenuated into a bitter, whittling blade. The cold arrogance of beauty distilled to an elixir of youth in death.

It had suddenly become very, very cold in the Hall of the Servants. A chill that had stolen a march upon them all. Very cold, and as silent as the grave.

Mierin's words plunged like black stones cast into a frigid mere.

"Henceforth, I will be Mierin Eronaille _Lanfear._ Daughter of the Night. And like any trueborn daughter, I acknowledge my sire. Here, in front of you all, I pledge my fealty to _Shai'tan,_ the Great Lord, whom you superstitious cowards call the Dark One. I will leave this assembly of mediocrity where I find myself unwelcome, and go to where I am _Chosen_.

If there are any amongst you of a similar spirit, tired of grubbing after Lews Therin's leavings, then do as I have done. Go to the Bore and hear _His_ voice. Bathe in His power. Farewell."

With a gesture from Lanfear, a black-within black vertical line appeared in the air in front of her. The Gateway dragged open with a guttural grinding wrench that the Aes Sedai felt rather than heard, the balescream of the Pattern tortured, rent. Latra Posae had been the first to react. "She's not channelling _saidar_! Whatever she's doing, _stop her at once!_ Shield her now!"

Lews Therin hurled a shield of Spirit, aiming to sever Mierin's connection to whatever it was she was it was he couldn't see it. Mierin's face was ecstatic, that violent rapture he had only seen on her countenance in bed.

He cast the shield like a slingstone with everything he had behind it, including a goodly surfeit of anger, knowing that as he did, he stood a good chance not just of shielding her, but of severing her from the Source forever. There could be no half-measures. Mierin was deadly strong and intuitively quick with _saidar_. Who knew what she was capable of with this True Power?

His weave was sliced in tatters, almost contemptuously, the flows rebounding into him. Then her own shield was pushing back at _him_ , an invisible knife he tried to parry by instinct.

Latra Posae went down. Shouting and hectoring one moment, barking orders to link with her, the next her eyes glazed over as she pitched to her knees.

Lews Therin could do nothing to help her. It was all he could do to try and keep Mierin from him. And sweet, suffering Light, it _hurt_!The edges of her shield felt barbed somehow. They didn't just cut into the bulwark of Spirit he strove to maintain, they felt like they were abrading his very _mind_.

The Dragon gritted his teeth with the effort. Concentrated. Threw her back. Her smile flashed, dazzling him with its brilliance, …and then she made a run for it.

An enormous fireball ripped up the floor where Mierin had been only a heartbeat before, scattering chips of mosaic tiles. He didn't need to look to know that the retributive weave had been a parting gift from his wife, Ilyena. But Mierin…. _Lanfear_ , he reminded himself … had thrown herself through the gateway like an athlete breasting the tape.

Leaving chaos, as always, in her wake. There were _dead bodies_ in this hallowed place!Da'shain who hadn't gotten out of the way in time, or those who had been goodhearted and foolhardy enough to attempt to aid the injured during the conflict. The little people, who were always the grist in her mill, always the unfortunate casualties every time _Lanfear_ decided to make a grand gesture. A lot of Aes Sedai looked the worse for wear, too. His brothers and sisters. There was anger in his heart. This could not stand.

 _Lanfear, we are done._ Lews Therin swore. _The next time I see you, one of us is going to die._

* * *

Latra Posae had woken angry as a bear from hibernation, with a headache that even Healing did not fully assuage. Lanfear, using the dark 'True Power', had spanked the lot them like unruly children. For her, that had been the day when the long War against the Shadow had truly begun. When the intangible evil she had sworn to oppose was made manifest to her, given a human face. And she saw only too clearly that they were _not_ ready for what was to come.

Lanfear had been but the first subverted by the Dark One, because her lust for power and dominance had been the greatest, but she would not be the last. Over the duration of the War, forty-one of the most mighty names in the Hall had gone over to the Shadow, to be rewarded with access to that blasphemous True Power. In addition to these so-called 'Chosen', over one thousand lesser Aes Sedai men and women had also turned their coats, becoming Dreadlords.

The War had been an avalanche, set in motion by the tumbling of the smallest pebble, as the firmament of the Light was challenged by the nihilist philosophy of Ishamael, the war-craft of Be'lal, Demandred and Rahvin, the hedonist seductions of Graendal. Mesaana turned the young and impressionable against their parents, sowing suspicion and fear. Semihrage broke the will of the strong with fear and pain. Aginor perverted Creation itself: his foul miscegenations hideous parodies of life.

Nothing less would have ended the strife between Latra Posae and Lews Therin. They were the hardiest among the Faithful, and the strongest of craft and will. Lews Therin was the Champion of the Light, its greatest general, and Latra Posae was the Artisan, the founder and creator of the great weapons of the Power, wrought to do no less than burn the Shadow from the Pattern itself. Artefacts that could level a city with a blow.

Together, they hunted down all those who had the effrontery to set themselves against the Light Militant. They harboured a particular vendetta against the Chosen, striking at them where they held themselves safest, in their strongholds.

Finally, only the most subtle, cunning, lucky and mighty amongst the Chosen were left. Thirteen prideful names. And the Shadow had learned to fear Latra Posae Decumae, the Cutter Of Shadows, just as much as Lews Therin Telamon.

Long had she laboured in her secret arts to craft a weapon that even the Dark One could not stand against. It began with a Seed, a particular _ter'angreal_ that was used to grow _angreal_ and _sa'angreal,_ which was created by painstakingly layering a tapestry of weaves upon each other until matter began to aggregate. Energy becoming mass.

Creating _ter'angreal_ was hard, even for one who had the Talent as strongly as she – and she required an unparalleled degree of perfection in this instance, because the finished _sa'angreal_ was going to be built on an unimaginable scale. The slightest flaw would therefore be magnified. Even if constructed perfectly, it would be the most dangerous object in the history of the world.

Latra Posae led a full circle to create the Seed, time after time rejecting the _ter'angreal_ as flawed to begin over, until she held herself satisfied. It was a mighty work of creation, and she let her instincts guide her, the weave of _saidin_ and _saidar_ enfolding layer upon layer like a rosebud opening for the first time.

Then the web grabbed Latra and her circle by the scruff of the neck, as it seemed to drink in the Power with abandon, and the flowering Power began to fold in upon itself, becoming harder and sharper until at last all that was left was a single green stone that looked like a great shaped emerald. The Power vanished from Latra and the Circle with an abruptness that left them all gasping like landed carp.

Latra looked down at the perfect stone, a zygote Seed that would, when it was fully grown be an _sa'angreal_ of unimaginable power, able to be used by a man, or a woman. All that remained was to nurture it with the Power.

Then, to her consternation and horror, it fractured through the middle, breaking into two jagged halves.

Latra Posae felt an instant of frustration and despondency. She knew that what she had woven was as close to perfection as she was capable. _Maybe the Creator cannot allow a mortal to wield power of this order of magnitude. The power to destroy His creation._

In despair, Latra closed her eyes, unwilling to show her collaborators the weakness of her tears. And for the first time in her life, she prayed. _Light save us._ And at that moment of her greatest doubt and trembling, when all the terrible philosophies of Elan Morin threatened to overwhelm her ordered, litigious mind the Creator spoke not.

Yet, with her eyes shut, she could still see one half of the fractured kernel, as clearly as if her eyes were open. _What the..?_ It appeared to be a perfect multi-layered lattice of pure _saidar._ The Cutter of Shadows turned to the male Aes Sedai next to her, pointing at the fragment she could see with her eyes closed. "Barahir, can you see that fragment with the Power?"

"No, Latra, that I cannot," the stout Tzorii frowned, teasing his long, forked beard through his fingers in restless knots. Abruptly, his eyes widened, and he started to his feet so suddenly he overthrew his chair, a man recoiling from a roused serpent at his feet, biting off an oath between his teeth. Latra Posae was death on bad language. "….Yet I can see the other piece, with my eyes shut or no. I do believe I could see it from leagues away, it do shine so!" he pronounced, naked awe in his voice, and not a little fear. Small wonder. Broken _ter'angreal_ were notoriously dangerous objects. Yet Latra somehow knew that this – that these – were nothing of the sort.

Not one Seed but two. Not one _sa'angreal_ but two, male and female. She had done it.

* * *

It had been an exhausting labour of three years for her circle to draw the power and split the flows into girthy columns of pure _saidin_ and _saidar_ respectively to nurture the growing _sa'angreal._ She quickly realised that in order for the finished devices to be used safely, they would need to be buffered strongly, so that surges in the One Power would not destroy the wielder, the _sa'angreal_ and quite likely a significant portion of the world.

To that end, she fashioned a pair of _ter'angreal_ as Access Keys – one for a man, one for a woman. Meanwhile the two growing _sa'angreal_ began to take shape. Their form was nothing she had intended, rather it seemed they took their own cast. They appeared like a statue of a man and a woman respectively, rendered in vitreous green crystal, each holding a sphere in one upheld hand, like Justice and the Light.

As she laboured, pouring her strength into the _sa'angreal,_ a plan began to form. If she and Lews Therin were to take up the Access Keys to the Choedan Kal and link, they could sweep the armies of the Shadow from the face of the Earth. Then, they could create a barrier around Shayol Ghul until a way was found to seal the rift in reality forever, and banish the Dark One from the world.

For Latra Posae Decumae herself had dared pick up the gauntlet that Lanfear had thrown down. Not to pledge to the Shadow, but in her pride, she went there to try her will against His.

She stood at the edge of the Bore, felt its foulness as the world of the tangible fell away beneath her feet into a bottomless nullity, a sump of malice and insanity that crawled and heaved and hungered.

Latra Posae knew her strength. She was old and canny, cagy and strong in craft and lore. Her resolve was granite. Then she had heard His voice. Rotted, clinging, corrosive enough to dissolve heartstone, let alone the stone of her heart.

Here was Negation. The Unhallowed, made flesh before a woman who heretofore had been agnostic, believing only in that which could be seen, measured or adduced. The things that held together. Here, she trembled and frayed, reason picked apart and stripped back by myriad infinitessimal fingernails of rasping black.

WHY HAVE YOU COME TO ME, LATRA POSAE? YOU WILL NEVER BE OF ME. DO YOU SEEK ANNIHILATION? THAT, TOO, IS IN MY GIFT. PERHAPS IT WOULD BE BETTER YOU DIE NOW, MORTAL, THAN TO SEE WHAT IS TO COME.

The magnitude of that awful voice forced her to her knees, then to her face. She did not dare look up. In her extremity of fear, she had soiled herself.

It was at that moment, her hubris in tatters, tears streaming down her face, a hammer greater than the world hanging over her head, able to destroy her beyond the hope of rebirth, maybe even salvation, Latra found the words that restored her courage. The bedrock of her soul, something truer than mere pride. She would _not_ die cowering in abasement. Instead she found herself shouting her words into the teeth of the gale.

"Ay, I'll tell you why I have come, though I die for it, _Shai'tan_!I come to speak for all those who have no voice to speak for themselves. The Dai'shain Aiel that you hunt for sport! The millions of prisoners Aginor breeds to fill Trolloc cookpots! You seek to torment the former for their forbearance from violence, and dehumanise the latter, but I tell you this: Their every act of kindness and decency is another arrow through your black heart!

I come to tell you that you can corrupt only the hollow ones like Mierin and Lilen. You think they are so strong because they are filled with the Creator's One Power. They are the least of us! Their hearts are broken vessels that have cracked in the kiln, and whose spirit has leached out. As for the rest of us, we will fight you until our last breath. And at the last, it will be those of us you sought to torment the most that will write your end."

Her defiant words were met by an instant of silence, then a horrible laughter that rattled her bones like a gale ripping through a picket fence.

FOR YOUR PRESUMPTION IN DEFYING ME, I WILL GIVE YOU TRUE PROPHECY. MAY IT BRING YOU ANGUISH.

YOU WILL LIVE TO SEE THE END OF EVERYTHING YOU HOLD DEAR, EVEN THE ORDER YOU BELONG TO. YOU WILL BREAK EVERY OATH, AND BETRAY EVERY VOW. YOU WILL DIE IN EXILE IN A WASTELAND EVEN I CANNOT SEE, AN HONOURLESS CREATURE HOUNDED AND HUNTED TO YOUR END.

THUS SHALL YOU END YOUR PRESUMPTUOUS LIFE, _SHADAR NOR._ AND YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED AS A TRAITOR.

And Latra Posae had fled before the Dark One's scorn. Having measured the Enemy, she deemed him a foe beyond the scope of Man. Even with the Choedan Kal, direct confrontation was futile. No, her way was better.

* * *

Lews Therin, however, intended something far more audacious. With or without the Choedan Kal, he intended to try and knit together the ragged edges of the Bore, holding the web together with seven seals of unbreakable _cuendillar_ to prevent the weave degrading over time.

It was a bold plan, and Latra Posae, swayed by his argument, thought it just might be feasible. It was then that the Foretelling came upon her. It told her of some dark doom that would befall them all if she took her _ajah_ of female Aes Sedai to the Bore, to link and form the Great Circles Lews Therin intended to use to seal the Dark One from the world.

Lews Therin had not believed the veracity of her Foretelling. "You lie!" he had accused her. "Ever have you sought to wrest from me my place by wile and stratagem. You seek to deny me because your own plan has failed. But I tell you, I will not be stayed."

Latra Posae had no choice but to withhold the aid of all the female Aes Sedai from his endeavour. Such was her standing amongst them that no female Aes Sedai, even Ilyena Therin Moerelle herself, dared lend their aid to Lews Therin.

The Foretelling had come upon her again, the resonance stronger, more undeniable a second time. It demanded of her a great betrayal. To take the newly-minted keys to the Choedan Kal, and the Ring of Tamyrlin, and to flee ahead of the coming storm. Its imperative was undeniable, and so she had been forsworn, abandoning oaths and fealty to flee, a thief in the night.

Lews Therin had been splenetic. With the Ring, Lews Therin could have forced the compliance of Latra Posae Decume and the rest of the female Aes Sedai who had abandoned him in their greatest hour of need, leaving him and the Hundred Companions to try and seal the Bore. Instead, Latra Posae had stolen it from him.

The Ring of Tamyrlin had represented the crowning achievement of his life, and Latra Posae's desertion in the face of the Enemy ranked as his greatest betrayal. The T'amyrlin pronounced a sentence of death upon her, and sent a hundred male Aes Sedai after her to impose it – a loss the forces of the Light could ill-afford to bear.

She had fled from Lews Therin's wrath with her Aes Sedai followers – all female – and a band of Da'shain Aiel servants, bearing not just the Ring of Dominion, but both access keys to the Choedan Kal, as well as every female _angreal_ and _ter'angreal_ she could lay her grasping hands upon.

No matter. The Lord of the Morning was set upon his course. He and his Hundred Companions struck at the Bore. Without female Aes Sedai, they could not link together and weave as one. However, they brought every great male _angreal_ and _sa'angreal_ they had in store. What they lacked in unity, they made up for in sheer might.

Lews Therin contended in spirit with that ageless Beast alone, and as he strove, he and his Companions drew tight their webs. They walled the Dark One up behind a hundred knotted weaves, drawn tight upon the cornerstones of the _cuendillar_ seals.

Then the Dark One retaliated. The Hundred Companions were drawing such a great magnitude of _saidin_ through the webs that were sealing him in that _Caisen Hob_ was able to pollute the Source of _saidin_ itself in the instant before it was sealed off from him, tainting it with his essence. In their moment of victory, Lews Therin and the Hundred Companions were instantly stricken insane, minds and bodies alike corrupted husks, filled with torment and the need to destroy.

With the warning of the Foretelling, Latra Posae had fled far and fast, and yet even so barely escaped the cataclysm of the Breaking. She felt the Dark One's counterstrike, the world juddering like a raker without a hand on the tiller, ringing like a struck cymbal. Suddenly, a madman's hand was wrenching at the Pattern, _saidar_ and corrupted _saidin_ attempting to wrest control of the Weaving of the Pattern from each other. Instead of working together harmoniously, the Powers themselves were in terrible discord.

Latra Posae then understood, and trembled at the knowledge. Had she not abandoned Lews Therin, then _saidar_ as well as _saidin_ would have been sullied, and the Wheel itself surely would be torn from its axle and thrown down. The Dark One would have destroyed _everything,_ including himself, rather than suffer impious binding at the hands of a mortal, no matter how powerful.

* * *

In the physical reality, the Breaking manifested as a terrible tidal event. The land buckled, heaving into a rolling tsunami wave that propagated from the Bore, travelling faster than a speeding _jo-_ car. It broke the spine of the great cities before entombing them under hundreds of yards of broken stone and earth. Time warped with the buckling of the Earth and where hours passed in one place, in another months, even years went by in others. Children fell into senescence and died to leave bleached bones in a matter of minutes.

The fabric of reality – already tottering under the damage incurred by the War of Power, weakened by balefire burning whole cities out of the Pattern – was snarling itself, fouling like a linen cloth on the frame of a spinning-mule that was galloping ahead unchecked, shaking itself apart. The Dead walked, corpse-lights on the marshes.

Latra Posae had fled far and fast. The pursuers Lews Therin sent after her – every strong male Aes Sedai that had been super-numerate to the number of male _angreal_ he had taken to the Bore – had pursued her and her followers doggedly. She had not dared to use Gateways or Skimming, as the strongest amongst her harriers had the Talent to read residues. A man called Herne Daghain Dornat. Herne the Hunter. Instead they had fled by _jo-_ car, the ramjet-propelled craft kept aloft by the ubiquitous maglev technology.

Latra stole a pair of snub-nosed Boxer troop transports, bluff craft with stubby gyrowings, fashioned from grey _cuerin_ ribbed with white-gleaming _cuendillar,_ and their sleek MetalHawk escorts, like hungry orca, impervious _cuendillar_ bellies and matt-black Power-forged tungsten alloy skin above.

The half-dozen MetalHawks were triangular-sectioned like a plunging _aran'gar_ dagger to avoid radio-detection. They looked like what they were. Lethal. Purposeful. War-darts, longing only to be loosed from hand, with brief, fore-raked wings, like a hummingbird, and a rudder. Each would cloak while in flight – enabled by a _ter'angeal_ for Folded Light, fabricated at exorbitant cost to exacting specifications.

Another theft, of men and material from the all-consuming war-effort that Shadar Nor would not allow herself to grieve.

The temporal backwash from the Breaking had swept over them before the upheaval of the ground, and their transports and escort fighters broke down overnight, simultaneously, their fuel evaporated in the tanks, leaving a viscous black treacle gumming the works. What works there were. Within the seamless, Power-hardened skin of the vessels, their mechanical innards evinced the corruption of centuries, rusted and pitted with great age. Useless.

Thereafter, Latra and those who followed her had commandeered oxen and carts, mules, to drag their priceless possessions as they fled. But they had been blessed insofar as that the temporal anomalies in the Pattern had distanced them and their chasers by months of travel.

The vagaries of the temporal distortion meant that the rolling earthquake had gone before them as they fled North, and they wandered in a mad God's rock-garden. Maps made no sense, and the churning magma under the Earth's crust coursed strangely, so even a compass-needle played the traveller false.

Sometimes the land was cracked and scarred with upwellings of molten lava, like the weeping sores of a burn victim. In other places, there were verdant tracts of land that appeared to have escaped unharmed, complete with streams, rivers and growing things. They had even found an intact summer orchard, complete with a factor's office, that must have been borne like a vessel on the storm, riding the wave of the Breaking from some sultry equatorial clime, and they had gorged themselves on its fruits.

But that was before they had learned not to trust anything, no matter how enticing it first appeared. There were a hundred novel ways to die in this brave new world. The clear tourmaline streams, so tempting to thirst-cracked lips, were often poison, contaminated, turned into corrosive sulphuric acid by volcanic activity, or steeped in lethal levels of arsenic. Radiation sickness from exposed veins of uranium ore that the Breaking had brought to the surface was one of the worst ways to go.

A score of Aiel had even died crushed by a pleasure-boat as they sought a pass through some uncharted mountain range. Somehow, in the Breaking, the ship of steel had been tossed upon a mountain peak, its keel broken by the horn of rock which had gored into its belly, transfixing it in place.

They had been passing beneath when with a tortured scream of rock upon steel, the bow of the sleek yacht had chosen that moment to tear loose and drop into the defile below like a headsman's axe. Latra had seen the name stencilled upon the vessel's bow as it plummeted down upon them. _The Creator's Mercy._ A jest to wake you in the night screaming.

And there were things that haunted the night, the raggedness of the Pattern allowing alien creatures to touch their world from adjacent domains. _Sindhol,_ the weft of possibilities to the woof of the Mirrors of the Wheel, realms of affine geometry and temporal possibilities rejected in the choosing of the Pattern.

The Aelfinn and Eelfinn. Snakes and Foxes. Pale, manlike forms that shunned the light, hated fire and iron, and could be charmed with music. These loathsome things were masters of their own form of representational magic. They fed upon emotion, and perhaps upon the Power as well. They had abducted Aiel, and even a couple of her Aes Sedai.

The few people they met were fleeing the fall of their own tower of Babel. They were of a dozen nations and none. The trauma of the upheavals and the eddying of time had displaced reason for many. Some sought the lighthouse of civilization as they rode the ocean of storms. Others fled its light, believing it to be a terrible fire that had burned the world.

Madmen bestrode the Breaking like colossi, wielding the One Power as a weapon. It was Latra Posae's singular grief that she could not do more to prevent it. She saw the rogue male Aes Sedai as her responsibility. Hers to punish. But the Foretelling forbade her to make a stand, not yet. It was a bitter jest indeed that she bore with her two of the most powerful weapons in existence, but must hide their light. With the World this eggshell-fragile, using the female Choedan Kal might be enough to fragment it beyond any hope of restoration.

She had begun her flight accompanied by with seventy-one female Aes Sedai – five Circles and change – and two hundred Da'shain Aiel. The men Lews Therin had sent after her were more numerous, true, but they could not link, so there was that in their favour.

Herne and his brethren were all deranged by now, many having the wasting sickness, but they had proved singularly devoted to the chase. They called themselves Herne's Hounds, or the Hounds of Tamyrlin. It seemed they had forgotten everything else that made them men, Aes Sedai – _everything_ except Lews Therin's last command. That and the lust to course and kill.

Herne himself was _changing,_ into something both more and less than man. A travesty of form that perfectly represented the vileness and cruelty that consumed him. The rotting sickness had him, cancers of the bone running unchecked, and his head was marred by spurs of protruding bone like antlers, pushing through his torn and lacerated scalp.

His legs lengthened, running to bare shanks of calcified bone that were inured to pain, that ate up the intervening miles in a tireless lope. The change must have caused him excruciating pain, but his animal senses only grew keener. Sharper. Like a black bear, he could scent his prey over twenty miles, further if she were injured or in pain. Oh, yes, and he could still channel. Like a black-souled tempest.

The final confrontation with the Hounds of Tamyrlin had occurred twenty days ago, when they were trekking across a huge salt-pan under a faded watercolour sky. It had been a seabed not long ago, until the cataclysm had spilt the ocean from its basin like water from an upset teacup.

A treacherous place. The brittle crust of minerals that reflected the drying sun's rays back in a blinding glare trapped a morass of mud and quicksand under the surface that could swallow a cart. Or a man. The caked surface of the salt-flats was now the unmarked grave for thirty Hounds of Tamyrlin, including Herne the Hunter himself, seventeen of her Aes Sedai sisters, and forty-five of her Aiel charges.

Now they were here. In the middle of nowhere. It might be the only place that the Breaking had not touched. The North Pole to the Bore's South. It was a place that only the desperate and the truly lost might ever find their way to. Which made it the perfect place. She looked up at her companions. Twenty-three Aes Sedai, excluding her, fifty-five Aiel. A beginning. An end.

One of the Aes Sedai broke the long silence. "Mother, why have we stopped here?"

"This is the place." Latra Posae grunted at the Tzorii woman in reply. _What was her name?_ Aredhel. Under the shelter of her _cadin'sor_ hood, Aredhel's braided hair was inset with hundreds of tiny cut-glass ornaments. A strange affectation for an otherwise practical woman.

Latra had once asked her why. "I began wearing the _kesiera_ when I heard what Jaric Mondoran did to my home." she had replied. "I wear it in honour of the Dai'shain Aiel who tried to heal him with the Song of Growing. He killed them all, of course, in his madness. Killed them as they continued to sing. But their sacrifice allowed everyone else to escape. The Dai'shain who we despised as weak proved to be our saviours. They were the True Dedicated. _Jenn_ Aiel." A long speech from a usually quiet woman. Quiet but dependable.

"Mother, I hardly think…" Aredhel began, falling silent at Latra's frown.

"Peace, Daughter. The Foretelling has led us to this place. Within the hour, I will die. But I have one thing I must do first. Once I am gone, it will be your task to help guide the Aiel. I lay this burden upon you, heavy though I know it to be, because of the great love you bear for them. Nine of your Sisters will remain here with you.

I ask of you a harder thing than you know, for you must put off your Great Serpent Ring and Shawl, even the name of Aes Sedai, and never use the term again. It is imperative that nobody has cause to seek amongst you for the lost treasures of the Aes Sedai.

Call yourself the Wise Ones. You shall take husbands among the Aiel." Latra chuckled grimly. "I deem this latter no hardship, for they are a comely people and enduring of spirit. You will test among your children and your children's children for those girls that can learn to channel, and apprentice them, raising them in turn as Wise Ones when they are ready. You may use the testing _ter'angreal_ for that purpose."

Latra turned to a diminutive Aes Sedai, pleased to see the square-jawed young woman meet her stare for stare. A _terteia_ , this one. A woman with sand in her craw. "Elisane Tishar, for you a different doom awaits. You shall leave the Three-Fold Land and return to the world beyond with twelve of your sisters. I regret I cannot even bequeath you the Ring of Tamyrlin as a symbol of authority. Against a hostile world, all I can spare you as a bulwark is your knowledge, and the strength of your Sisters. Together, you are thirteen – a true circle, and a symbol of wholeness.

Seek out our kindred – if any survived the Breaking – and find a place to rebuild, if any goodly place yet exists in this benighted world. It falls upon your shoulders to re-establish the order of the Aes Sedai. The old has gone, beyond redemption and saving, and I Foretell that there will never again be male Aes Sedai, except but one, who will be Reborn in an Age yet to come. And yet the world needs a familiar light, that of the Servants Of All, to succour them, to amend and salvage what can be saved from the shipwreck that is Mankind.

I therefore name you the Amyrlin, the Flame of the Aes Sedai, and I task you further to watch over the Seals that Lews Therin Telamon used to imprison the Dark One, if they can be found. To you and those of your line will fall the long vigil to ward against the awakening of _Shai'tan._ "

Aredhel found the will to contradict the formidable matriarch. "Mother, this is not a place where anyone can live."

"Say you so, Daughter?" With an unaccustomed display of affection, Latra patted the younger woman's shoulder. "Mayhap this old dog has one last trick to show you."

Reluctantly, she withdrew the Tamyrlin Ring, holding it in the hollow of her hand. Such a small thing to represent her generations-long struggle with wily Lews Therin. "See that this is buried with me" she bade Aredhel. "In my papers, you will find a letter that belongs with it. You will know it when you see it. Seal the letter inside a stasis-tube and place it with my ashes and the Ring, when you put me in the ground.

Plant the _chora_ seed above me, and task the Aiel with the tree's care. While it lives, the Tree will ward prying eyes away from the Tamyrlin Ring until it is needed once more. And now, I must bid you farewell."

With an effort, Latra Posae reached out for the Power through the augmenting Tamyrlin Ring. An almost imperceptible vibration stirred the sands, the oscillation becoming louder as the Cutter of the Shadow lensed the One Power through the powerful _angreal._ A small fissure a yard across cracked open in the dry ground as Latra Posae drilled through hundreds of feet of bedrock beneath the desert sands. A needle's eye in the vastness of the desert.

Latra's followers waited expectantly for a sign. Nothing. Seconds lengthened into minutes, and feet began to shuffle, and those few hopeful faces fell downcast.

Suddenly, a geyser of water sprung up from the rent she had fashioned, the water pressure such that the jet of water sprang a hundred feet in the air as the spigot of earth was tapped. The shocked bystanders leapt back in alarm. A deluge of clean water sprayed the incredulous, delighted Aiel and Aes Sedai with an unexpected rainfall. "There," muttered Latra Posae Decumae to nobody in particular. "That should last you a few thousand years or so, if you look after it."

She was weary, suddenly. It looked as good a place as any to take her rest, she thought, as she laid down.


	2. Chapter 2: Harbinger

**Chapter 2: Harbinger**

The adversaries circled, bare feet measured upon the polished mahogany of the wooden floor.

The two men were a contrast in every way – the tall red-haired Aiel against the short, compact Seanchan. The Aiel was dressed in desert garb, the strip-layered rags of his _cadin'sor_ a crypsis, the arid no-colour of the Aiel Waste. The Westron was bare to the waist above trews of black silk. The _shoufa_ covered the Aiel's face, blue-within-blue eyes above the veil assessing his opponent. Aiel hid their face before they killed. The Seanchan, his clean-shaven head denoting his rank amongst the High Blood, showed his true face without shame when he chose to take life.

Both men's hands were empty. They would do their fighting with fists and feet.

The training ground was an enclosed hall whose upper tier had a balcony for spectators to view the combatants, with latticed wooden windows, currently standing ajar to take advantage of whatever breeze there might be. There were no observers. The youth did not care for others watching him train.

The evening was humid, close, the air charged. Autumn drew in abruptly in Seandar following a hot dry summer, with torrential downpours which lasted months. The transition was regular, predictable yet always shocking in its vehemence, its wildness. Summer hung tenuously on, a cloth on the edge of fraying, a horse on the edge of bolting. A man on the edge of control. It fitted the young Seanchan's mood. It was a time for violent change.

His name was Uthair ap Cauthon Paendrag. He was eighteen years old, a warrior to the ends of his lacquered fingernails.

His genetic heritage from his royal mother, the Empress Fortuona, was obviously apparent in his short stature, his teak-tough physique and _kaf-_ coloured skin. At first glance, the young Blood was unprepossessing, unhandsome, with a broad, flat nose, rounded cheeks and round, liquid eyes. He was soft-spoken, his voice carefully modulated in the slurring cadence of the Seandar dialect, and his words were few. Not a charismatic man, not one others would readily follow.

However, a more discerning observation could not fail to mark the energy in those hazel eyes. The will radiating from them when he showed his true face. _That_ was why he chose to study the martial arts in seclusion.

Uthair's hands, a hawk's talons on the jesses. The Blood, exalted. Uthair's eyes peregrine, unblinking. Lucid, hungry and proud.

Like his mother, he possessed a talent for this form of combat. Uthair was a student of the sword and the bow. He was more skilled with the sword – perhaps close to the level of what passed for a blademaster in these debased times – but there was something beyond the aesthetic of the forms about unarmed fighting that particularly called to him. A redolent savagery, couched in a sophisticated, nuanced language that was particularly Seanchan. Where _he_ himself was the only weapon he needed. It was a perfection of self-sufficiency.

Uthair had been a student of war in all its forms since he could walk. With bow and sword and lance, from the back of a _raken_ , with his bare hands, and in all the other manifold ways men had created to dominate, to subjugate one another. Politics, diplomacy. Economics. His education had been complete, demanding enough to satiate his fierce intelligence. Thorough enough that the values it instilled became unquestioned axioms:

Life was competition, unending, absolute. The strong and shrewd prevailed. Those that did not hesitate. Success proved one's fitness to govern, to rule. The ultimate loyalty was to the Empire – to serve it to the limits of one's ability. It superseded ties to family, even to the Empress herself. It was why the Seanchan empire had endured, prospered for a thousand years.

It was the Aiel who struck first, long limb lashing out in a raking kick, utilising his considerable advantage in reach. The Seanchan blocked with his lower leg, the calcified bone of his tibia hardened, inured to pain, the product of endless repetition, kicking the unyielding post of the hardwood fighting-tree until the nerves in his shins died, ceased registering pain.

Uthair cut inside, planting his blocking leg, a swift chassis-step to launch an explosive side-kick, shaping the side of his foot into a rigid blade aimed at the Aiel's ribcage. The Aiel grunted, feeling the force of the kick land like an axe blow, springing a rib. The young Seanchan followed up, throwing a high roundhouse.

The Aiel blocked reflexively and countered, dropping his shoulder into a wide horse-stance, side-on to his opponent, throwing a stabbing snap-punch, then a backfist that exploded against the young nobleman's cheekbone. Crisp blows, well-timed, snapping the rough cloth of his _cadin'sor_ like a banner in a stiff wind _._ The Seanchan grimaced, spitting blood, and took an appreciative backwards step.

 _A pace given up now earns us two at the dawn_. The words of his greatsire, Artur Hawkwing.

The Aiel pressed, as Uthair knew he would – walking straight on to Uthair's spinning back-kick – planted squarely into his damaged ribs. Real pain in those blue eyes now, as the breath was beaten from his lungs.

The Shaido was a tough, seasoned man, a master practitioner of the Aiel open-hand fighting discipline, but the High Lord had learnt from the very best masters of the Seanchan fighting system, inculcated and perfected over a thousand years. Since the _Corenne,_ the Return, it had repeatedly proved its superiority over the disciplines practiced this side of the Aryth Ocean – particularly the jealously-guarded forms only taught to the Imperial Family for self-defence.

Yet Uthair was not a complacent man, and neither were his teachers. They sought out the best exponents from other lands as training opponents. Currently, this Aiel – a Shaido of the Knife Hands warrior society – and a tattooed Sharan were his favoured practice partners for unarmed combat.

The Seanchan martial arts continued to evolve, incorporating tenets of the novel forms they encountered, the Seanchan masters studying technique and philosophy from the subjugated peoples that the Raven Empire rolled over. No dogmatic adherence was permitted of them – master or student.

Still waters become stagnant. Victory validated.

Uthair prowled, scenting weakness, ceaselessly moving, up on the balls of his feet. Poised. His ebony skin was wicked with sweat. He breathed easily, in through the nose, out through the mouth. One arm extended, the other guarding his breast, hands held low like daggers, fingers extended.

The injured Aiel warrior was a contrast in stillness, planting his feet in an L-stance, careful. Watchful. Clenched fists hammers ready to fall.

With a growl, Uthair attacked, a quicksilver flurry of chopping kicks and elbow-strikes, and the rangy Shaido countered, trying to land an explosive punch, covering well with his long arms. The brief engagement was inconclusive, but it was Uthair once more who took the first step backwards.

The Shaido probed with a controlled _teep_ , withdrawing the leg, the raised knee still threatening, feinting. A lazy-looking flick of those long legs could deal real damage. Uthair had learned the hard way, more than once. It was one of the real strengths of the Aiel's unarmed combat system, deceptively dangerous, and it was doubly effective against a smaller man. Uthair tried to work round it, being rebuffed.

Any gleeman's tumbler, any veiled _da'covale_ could cavort around, turning somersaults and kicking the air. The essence of fighting was judgement. A mature appreciation of distance and timing. This, the Shaido had in abundance, for all the unlovely angularity of his form.

Style didn't matter. Control did. Mastery – of yourself, first, then of the confrontation, and finally of your adversary.

Space and timing. And if Uthair's was found wanting, the Shaido would discipline him.

The Aiel struck suddenly, a flickering snap-kick aimed for his face. Uthair blocked easily, fading away under it to take the weight out of the strike. You didn't want to take such a blow full on – it would break your forearm as surely as an iron bar.

But the attack was a feint, the Shaido twisting his body mid-air to deliver a resounding roundhouse with his other leg. It was a move from the _oosquai_ dance, delivered with a wilding, almost drunken relish – and the passion of it, a departure from the measured parsimony and cold-minded approach with which the Shaido usually prosecuted a fight took the young Seanchan aback.

A revelation from the older man. _I know myself._ A challenge to the younger. _Do you know me, enemy?_

Rather than throwing the kick at Uthair's head, giving him a chance to duck out of the way, it was another vehement blow aimed for the younger man's torso. Uthair had nowhere to go. He made a V of elbow and forearm, ducking into the strike, trying to take as much of the impact with the meat of his shoulder as possible.

It didn't work well enough. The kick pulverised Uthair's upper arm, snapping the bone like kindling, leaving his left arm hanging uselessly by his side. There was instant, immediate pain, sickening in its intensity.

Clarity. A lucid pearl in the lees of the cup of gall Uthair drained. _Ay, I know thee – Teacher, not foe. Thine, to show me pain. But pain only dissuades the weak. The unforged._

Uthair felt the breath of the Aiel's next strike upon his brow – a hook-kick aimed for his unprotected temple – as he dropped under it, slamming a bear-paw palm strike into the Aiel's solar plexus, spinning to sweep the Shaido's unprotected standing leg from under him, driving a knee into his groin as he toppled slowly backwards. The High Lord followed the Shaido to the ground, pinioning the taller man's body with his legs, shaping a knife-hand strike which he checked an inch from his opponent's neck.

The Aiel placed a hand flat upon the floor signifying his submission and Uthair pushed himself to his feet, savouring his victory. Through the adrenaline, his broken arm pulsed red-black with agony, which he welcomed. Something he had learned from the Aiel. You didn't fight pain. You accepted it.

He offered his beaten opponent an arm and they grasped elbows as Uthair hauled him to his feet. It was a mark of appreciation. Though the Knife Hand was a technically inferior fighter in many ways, Uthair relished his uncompromising style. You could beat him bloody, but he would take any amount of punishment for the chance to hurt you. It was why the High Lord kept him around to spar with.

 _Until shade is gone, and water is gone. To spit in Sightblinder's eye upon the last day._ The Aiel creed.

The Shaido – Muradin, son of Muradin – pulled down the _shoufa_ to talk. The two men had a strange relationship. Until Uthair was done learning what the Shaido had to teach, he was the student, and Muradin the master.

Uthair crooked a finger, beckoning the _sul'dam_ and _damane_ who stood attentively watching. Another way in which he was different. Unlike most of the Blood – the only people who could afford it in any case – he'd accept Healing from a _damane._ It was a matter of practicality. Healing meant he could train harder, with greater realism, both with hands and feet and also with practice swords – bundles of wooden laths.

Pain from a sprained wrist, a few broken ribs were a good lesson to keep your form. Less serious injuries than concussions and broken bones were not worth the Healing. The purpose of training was to become strong and sure, not weak and complacent.

Heads bowed, hair-cowled, deferential, the presence of the woman and her chattel barely registered upon Uthair. An outline of the _damane_ 's freshly-scrubbed face, blanched in apprehension, meekly inclined towards the floor, her eyes lowered as she observed _sei'mosiev_. The girl's lips almost bloodless. A bare impression of a woman, drawn lines of sere grey dragged over a taut white canvas. A charcoal sketch idly discarded.

At a terse nod from the Leash Holder, the _damane_ laid a long hand upon his shoulder, and Uthair felt her trembling to the ends of her curtly-clipped fingernails.

The now-familiar sensation of Healing – a torrent of ice rushing through his veins, causing his muscles to spasm – tore through him. It was agonising. Invigorating. Like being thrown into a frozen lake. He disdained the ecstasy as he endured the pain, the _sei'taer_ disciplining his countenance from displaying either, body hardened, hewn in mahogony. He did not even blink. Pain and pleasure were ephemera. Distractions to be borne, and dangerous ones at that.

 _Almost as dangerous as pride._

Uthair gestured for the _damane_ to heal Muradin. It had been a good session, since they both needed Healing after it.

The _sul'dam_ turned to him after a whispered confabulation with the Leashed One while the _damane_ healed the Aiel. _Damane_ simply didn't talk to the Blood directly, unless expressly commanded to do so.

"Highness, the Healing took much out of you, drawing a large debt from your body's reserves" the hare-lipped Leash Holder advised, with asperity. Her voice, crisp as the flame emblazoned auric upon the haughty empanelled crimson of her _der'sul'dam_ 's coat, a whit less brisk than that of a Truthspeaker, causing Uthair to bridle, his eyes tightening.

If the forthright woman noted his displeasure, she gave no sign of it. Light, the woman was full of herself to speak so to the High! "Fractures take time to fully mend, even with Healing" the Mistress of Damane admonished – for all the world, mother to recalcitrant child. "You will need to eat a prodigious amount over the next couple of days – milk and cheese to aid the calcification of your bones, red and white meat and vegetables to replenish your blood – and I wouldn't countenance _sparring_ until then." A curl of the lip, a shading of inflection, indicating all too well what the _der'sul'dam_ thought of his martial pursuits. Frivolous. Foolhardy.

Men's violence, of sword, spear and lance, little more than ritualised posturing to the women who called the lightning, and made it dance amongst the foes of the Crystal Throne. At best, a seemly choreography, the clean lines of a _da'covale_ 's dance, occasioning little in the way of real harm.

The High Lord looked down and saw the flesh of his forearms pebbled with goose-bumps, despite the clammy heat. Uthair nodded distractedly, and anticipating his master's wants, the half-shorn _so'jhin –_ a male attendant almost as unobtrusive as a Grey Man – swept forward with a tunic of unadorned black silk to match his trousers. Uthair extended his arms, allowing the willowy, blond functionary to deftly slip the garment over his shoulders. It was done with all the self-effacing artistry of the High Among Low. Theirs, aspiring to mastery in their allotted tasks, however mundane. A becoming marriage of functionality and form.

The young High Lord stalked across to the Shaido, his every stride sprung steel. A man mindful that theirs was a battle but half fought. Well-begun but far from over. Muradin was already seated comfortably on the hardwood floor, awaiting him, long legs folded in front of him. A foe drawn up upon prepared ground. Uthair sat down facing him, mirroring his teacher, assuming the no-face of combat. A countenance planed smooth of tics and tells. This was the last part of the day's training – to strive mind against mind, will against will.

Muradin's words were couched in formality. Courtesy, the veneer of a civilised people. Or a martial culture, where thoughtless words occasioned challenge and duel.

"May you find water and shade, Uthair son of Maitrim." As usual, Muradin chose to ignore the sudden anger in the young man's eye at being ceaselessly reminded of his father. The Shaido spoke as he would. "You are a strong man for a wetlander, and you are a talented warrior. I have little left to teach you in that respect. But the only place where you seem free, when you are truly yourself, is when you fight. In itself, there is nothing wrong with this. There is much joy to be found in the dance of spears.

However, you become increasingly hard. Ambitious. In this, you remind me of my own father, and my brother-father Couladin. Like you, they both had the seeds of greatness within them. Either one had the potential to become a worthy clan chief.

Yet both of them failed. They became corrupted from within, and my whole _clan_ became corrupted with them. You have it in you to be a great man, not merely a great warrior. But you are narrow. For you there is only war, even within your own people, within your own hold."

His father. Maitrim Cauthon's legacy was not so readily apparent in Uthair's face and form. It dwelt within, however – written in nerve and sinew and will. In his apt hands, his sire's coltish reflexes bridled, ruled and restrained by a man's discipline. In blood, the truest bond between one man and another.

His father, Mat Cauthon had been his teacher with the Two Rivers longbow, and Uthair had trained assiduously, striven harder to master the weapon than with any other. Practiced until the whipped hemp of the bowcord, tacky with horse-glue, was stained with blood from raw-scraped fingertips. Until the ache of the draw was written into his back and shoulderblades.

Blood called to blood.

Blood ran true. Blood, keening through a man's veins. The Blood exalted. And Uthair's, through his father, was the oldest vintage in the world. That of the Iron Kings of Manetheren, Shadow's Bane.

Speak it soft – but there had been kings of the Mountain Home before little Shandalle was ever thought of. Men of valour who had shouldered the burden of the Unceasing War against the Shadow, long before Artur Hawkwing – taking a man's name on their thirteenth name-day, and shaving their head of a boy's long hair, the better to wear a man's grim helm of carburised iron. A heavy weight upon stripling neck – but not as heavy as the simple band of leather, the braided cord of the _hadori._ A pledge to hold true to pledge and troth. To uphold the Light.

Father remained an enigma to Uthair. Always quick to hide his feelings within a jest. And then suddenly, shockingly maudlin, prone to indecorous statements of his feelings. But he was still his sire, the most famous of the heroes of _Tarmon Gai'don_ yet living. The greatest general of the age.

Uthair had sought to see past his peasant sensibilities, yearning to impress him. To emulate his achievements. It was the story of sons and fathers everywhere, he supposed. Yet it seemed that, if anything, the harder Uthair drove himself to become the perfect soldier – strong, fearless, dutiful, ruthless – the more the gulf between the two men grew, his father becoming unknowable, alien.

Uthair smiled, shrugging, but his words held bite. "How then, Muradin, shall I find you a dress and name you my Truthspeaker? The Seanchan are not as the Aiel, nor am I as your ignorant clan chiefs. I am learned in more than merely the arts of war. I have studied the dynamics of power and its uses, politics and economics. When my time comes, I will demonstrate my worth, and take my rightful place. However exalted or humble that might be."

Muradin didn't tender a smile in return. "The very fact you speak of having a Truthspeaker, even in jest, attests to your ambition, and tells me you have no regard for the customs of your people. Among your people, no man has led for eight hundred years. A custom as strong as law."

Anger coursed through Uthair, a frigid tide ripsawing under a rime of black ice. "Even if I accepted the custom as binding, the Empress has no daughters, and the Forsaken, Semirhage, sowed chaos in Seanchan to such effect that many of the principals amongst the High Blood are now dead, leaving only distant female relations with little claim to the Throne. Watered blood.

And I _do not_ accept the premise. Why should I suffer, and all male claimants after me, for the actions of one bad – and mad – Emperor? Our dynasty was _founded_ by _men_ of worth! By Artur and Luthair – and by Luthair's son whose name I bear."

"Your name was also borne by the madman who last held the Imperial throne. An interesting choice of name to take upon yourself when you came of age, that." The Aiel turned serious, pensive. "In the case of your people, perhaps madness does run in the male line. It is something you should consider carefully."

"Have a care, Aiel." Uthair glowered. "You overstep. I have given your tongue latitude thus far, but one is not to speak so to the High Blood." Yet Uthair paused in drawing breath, a measure that an unsophisticated man – an untrained man without a warrior's sense of cadence – might not have marked as significant. "Do you see madness in me, Muradin son of Muradin?"

"In truth, I do not know" the Shaido replied honestly. Even blithely, as one unsophisticated. "Maybe. Maybe not. Some kinds of madness are a seed, buried deep. Your character is lucid and calculating, and I think I begin to know you, then I find a streak of desperation, of rashness. I see it when you fight. We have exchanged many blows, you and I, and I hope I am wrong in my fears that you will become as Couladin was. Both for your own sake – we have shared water and shade – and for your people."

"Were I to give you counsel, Uthair son of Maitrim, it would be this: Cease striving against your father. Unless your sire is a bad man, you incur much _toh_ in opposing him. Though he and I have blood feud from Couladin's death, I recognise in Maitrim Cauthon a man of much _ji –_ both as a clan chief directing the dancing of the spears, and as one who seeks the good of the clan over the burning of personal ambition – even though he took the Roofmistress of all Seanchan _gai'shain._ I intend no disrespect when I mention your mother just now, young man.

And secondly. A man has _toh_ to his people, always. Sometimes, discharging the obligation means not seeking advancement, even when you see others of more limited ability elected in your stead. There is much _ji_ to be found in humble service, in fulfilling the role your people ask of you to the best of your potential.

I sense that you stand upon the knife-edge of a decision. Are you sufficiently self-aware to know the limits of your character, better than the customs of your people? Can you say for sure you are the right one to lead?

If you truly are, then maybe even _ji_ must bend. What is one man's honour against the good of his nation? This was my uncle's choice – yet it was wrong in that instance. Maybe it is _always_ wrong. Maybe nothing good can ever come of such an act. Remember honour. Remember obligation. And consider custom."

Uthair nodded seriously. "I consider _everything_. There is much I contemplate beyond your ken. Honour is a single facet of a cut stone that I turn over and over in my mind.

I believe our discussion has run its course for now. We will pick up where we left off tomorrow, if my duties permit me the latitude. In future, however, confine your remarks to my development as a warrior. In particular, it is not your place to broach the subject of my family. I am a tolerant man, but if you persist so, I shall be compelled to discipline you, to restore order and show you your proper place. I do not wish to do it, but I will do so."

Muradin shrugged, fractionally. "It shall be as you wish. May you find water and shade."

As Uthair stood, the cupola above their heads tolled like a bell as the first lightning of fall struck. The rounded dome was equipped with a copper earthing-rod, but the terrific impact resonated the whole building. At the commencement of hostilities, rain and wind tore into the body of the building, routing the casements to clatter in their frames and sending a tumbling torrent of desiccated summer leaves screaming into the training ground.

At once the building was alive with _da'covale_ , rushing to close and latch the windows and their covers against the monsoon, their shouts inaudible over the booming gale and the rolling thunder – not one strike but dozens. The immaculately-kept hall was awash with filthy runoff water from the lead guttering, leaves heedlessly trampled into mulch on the lacquered floor as the servants desperately sought to secure the property against the tornado.

Uthair raised his arms above his head, stretching, exulting. _I am the storm!_ A forbidden, wilding thought in his mind: _This_ must be what it is like to be _Tsorov'ande Doon._ To channel the tempest. An annihilating, _cleansing_ cyclone that would ensure that only the deserving survived.

Presaged by a terrific battering at the casements, a half-closed window was obliterated by a sudden impact, hurling a luckless _da'covale_ stunned to the floor. Through its wrack, the flying splinters of wood, tore a winged shape, appearing first as a sable shadow, casting its dark over Uthair as it unfurled its mighty wings. Despite his self-control, Uthair nearly flinched, and then he saw what it was and his proud heart vaunted even as he blinked in disbelief.

It was an albatross! The great bird was a rare sojourner in these lands, following the great river into the city of Seandar. The storm had driven him down from his lonely course thousands of feet above the land, slope-soaring on the thermals as if they were _aven'kal_ – the wave of destiny – itself, imperiously covering a thousand leagues a day in enigmatic flight – too high for even the keenest of eyes to mark his sojourn.

But this was a storm even he could not ride out. His mighty breast was as white as a dove's, bringer of peace, but those wings, oh, that thirteen-foot span was striated black and grey, and the beating of those wings was the hammering of a mighty heart, the report deafening in the swordsman's hall. Sinews straining, the great bird banked, circling over the balcony.

There wasn't quite room, and there was a crash as the sword-hard edge of one outstretched wing raked one of the delicate wooden spars connecting the balcony to the ceiling, shearing it through. A full circle he turned, like a Sea Folk _raker_ under the lee of the Father of Storms, long slashing beak opening as he sounded his _ki'ai,_ the brazen call of his challenge, fixing the young prince with one glossy black eye. Then he was gone, eeling through an open window like a winged serpent, leaving the youth wondering at what he had just witnessed.

A single great feather, black as jet, drifted to the floor to land at Uthair's feet. Slowly, reverently, the prince stooped to pick it up, holding it by its quill.

Long he stood still, long and long, his gaze upon the token as if trying to believe what he had just seen. It was an unmistakeable omen. A harbinger. And it was at that moment that Uthair Paendrag accepted his manifest destiny.

It would be great. And terrible beyond measure.


	3. Chapter 3: Young Raven

**Chapter 3: Young Raven**

 _Two years earlier._

His name was Uthair Abell Paendrag. He was a warrior.

The high road to Seandar, so invitingly displayed, was shut against him. The winter plain it cut straight across was a bleak tundra, under an oppressive steel-hued sky, from which snow fell, light enough that a man could still see the battlefield. Beyond, the mountains reared abruptly, a slate dagger thrust through Mother Earth's unsuspecting stomach to rear jagged and fell, the precipitous backdrop. The mountains, and the high pass to Seandar, the road ribboning through the Nadin Gap.

Obdurately planted in his way, a host. Tight as a cork in a bottle, the hostile force plugged the mouth of the Nadin Gap, their flanks guarded by the mountains themselves. At this remove, even Uthair's sharp young eyes could not discern the composition of their ground troops, only guess at their number and disposition. Their numbers were not the problem, however many there were. It was their presence here.

Seandar, the capital city of the Seanchan Empire, was the only loyal stronghold in the North. While his father, Raven Prince Maitrim Cauthon, concentrated his forces on defeating the Southern rebels, the Winged Hammer had been given the mandate of tying down the Usurper, Handoin in the North.

It was textbook asymmetric warfare. With five thousand picked men, he'd occupied fifty thousand enemy troops, using Gateway jumps to strike like summer lightening and withdraw before his opponents galvanised a response. He'd been at it all Autumn. Uthair had driven his men hard, his _damane_ harder, and himself the hardest of all. Now all he wanted was to withdraw his tired forces into Seandar, to direly-needed rest and to replenish his provisions. They had been on half-rations for the past week. But his path was barred.

Uthair knew how he must look. His formerly stocky sixteen-year old frame was gaunt, near-emaciated, his eyes bruised hollows from lack of sleep. He was hungry and tired – more than merely tired. Spent. Weary with care, a heaviness of body and spirit that no amount of sleep would erase. Weak.

His face was scrubby with stubble, even his shorn pate – the mark of his exalted rank amongst the High Blood – bristling with the furze of six week's growth. The usually fastidious Banner-General was past caring about his unkempt appearance. But there was a dangerous light yet burning in his eyes. That of a boxer, cut and bleeding, reeling, summoning the energy to throw one last, savage combination before the final bell.

The High Lord looked upon his army, the men and women of the elite Winged Hammer regiment, with pride. With awe. There were thirty-five hundred yet remaining to him. They'd led Handoin a merry dance all over the Northlands, from Anangore to Imfaral, jabbing and taunting, slipping his ponderous counters.

His forces had fought two major engagements. In the first, they'd annihilated fifteen thousand men under Aldoin Fairhand. A solid body blow. In the second, he'd engaged the White Boar himself and his twenty thousand.

Carried away by his early success, the sight of the Usurper's hated banner a tantalising twenty yards away, he'd flung himself heedlessly into the fray, trying to cut his way to the pretender himself – who stood like the Fisher King hemmed about by his pawns on the _sha'rah_ board, the elite Deathwatch Guardsmen. Glory was at the end of Uthair's sword, and he would take it!

He came, roaring, out of the night, red-handed, savage, hurling himself upon his foes. A desperate battle under torchlight, where the Bloody Boar stood at bay.

But _sha'rah,_ the Great Game and bloody battle care not for the passions of callow boys, nor for glory. Uthair, flanked by two Ogier Gardeners, hewed down dozens of men, before having to do with the veteran Deathwatch Guard who stood in their liege's last defence.

Blood flew, black under the flickering, uncertain light of burning brands.

Two times Uthair threw himself upon their serried spears, each time cutting down an enemy warrior before they hurled him back. A third time he charged them, sword singing. A grievous spear-thrust laid him low, only the quality of his helm saving his life.

One of the Gardeners had died retrieving his body, the other Ogier succumbing to his wounds shortly thereafter. Along with almost a thousand of his men dead or too injured to fight.

It had been a victory, of sorts. The enemy lost three thousand and withdrew from the field in good order, leaving Uthair master of a blood-slick corpse-midden come chilly morn. He'd been sickened when he learned the cost of his hubris. Losses, unsustainable losses! And Handoin had escaped him.

So much for glory.

After the field of Asinbayar, Uthair had been counting the cost, ruing it ever since. He'd begun with fifty _damane_ with the Talent and strength for Gateways. He now had twenty, few with the strength left for meaningful channelling, let alone that required for Travelling. He had boasted two hundred _to'raken_ and three hundred _raken._ He now had an even hundred of each, with another hundred too injured to fly – the flying beasts were like athletes, like racehorses, susceptible to wing membrane tears and the like. Uthair had been profligate in how he used them and the edge they gave him in manoeuvrability. Now the edge was gone, his army a good sword in need of the grindstone. Of the two commodities of which there was never enough. Rest and time.

Travelling, the _raken_ – they had been his edge. Without that and the calibre of his troops at his disposal, they would have been destroyed months ago. He strode to the head of his Fists of Heaven, wondering at them. Superbly disciplined. Indomitable. These men hailed from near here, from the Aldael Mountains. Reserved, even for Seanchan, grim and taciturn. You had to earn their respect. It was not a thing lightly bestowed.

As his gaze fell upon them, they drew themselves up proudly, puffing out chests hunger had hollowed. Fists of Heaven were the best light infantry in the world, air-borne shock troops, and Uthair didn't doubt they would front up fearlessly against whatever the enemy threw at him – heavies, Deathwatch Guards, _lopar, grolm_ – without complaint. It was his responsibility to husband their strength, protect them from their own courage.

As he watched them, one of the front-rankers – a girl no older than he was himself – fell senseless. Exhaustion. Her rankers tensed, expecting punishment for their comrade.

A tear in his eye, Uthair stooped to her, and laid his sable Banner-General's heavy greatcoat over her prone form. She didn't stir. Gently, he pressed his finger against her neck, seeking her pulse. It was there, barely. Tremulous beneath his fingers. Her face in repose was pinched and anaemic, that of a weary child.

Slowly, Uthair stood. Breaking off the long, lacquered fingernail of his ring finger, he turned to her nearest companion, a lad not much older. He stood at rigid attention, spear-straight, eyes facing forward, even as his General's gaze fell upon him. Barely more than children, and yet veterans. What did that say about the Raven Empire?

 _That we know duty, every man and boy!_ A fierce voice from within surprised Uthair with its vehemence. _We fight, because what we have is worth fighting for._

Uthair swallowed a lump in his throat before he trusted himself to speak. His voice husky as he addressed the young warrior. "I put you in charge of her care, soldier. Get some food from the Quartermaster for her, at my command, and damn the rations. When she awakens, give her this." He pressed the fingernail into the young soldier's hand.

The young man's eyes widened at the magnitude of the gift. This was not a thing lightly done. It automatically raised the recipient to the Blood, in perpetuity, and her descendants after her. An inalienable title. One of the Blood could be put to death, but could not be stripped of their rank.

Uthair raised his voice. "You men and women are _all_ noble. You have demonstrated your worth, day after night, through the duress and pain and fear which are a soldier's lot. I won't say you have suffered without complaint – you surly goatsons, you." There were a few soft, knowing chuckles at that.

"But you have gone far beyond duty, and today it is time I honour that sacrifice. Because you know as I do that the Empire is more than a name. You know it for a place of peace and prosperity, where a freeborn citizen may raise a family, run a business, travel and dwell where he will in security, no matter his position, low or high. Where his deeds – his _worth_ – can elevate his station."

Uthair swung upon his heel, pointing with outflung arm across the battlefield to where the enemy brooded in silence. A petering shower of hail roused a winter phalanx to oppose them, tall spears of white, sky-scraping. The battle-formations of the Light, arms shouldered.

A thing to daunt lesser men – and fire the blood of a true son of the Hawkwing!

"That rabble over there – they have abandoned all that when they fell into sedition! If Handoin wished to claim the Crystal Throne, he had only to venture himself in a war of intrigue against our glorious Empress. A wager of the body, which he would most assuredly have lost!

The wind flung squalling sleet in Uthair's face, and he raised his voice, to carry above it. He scorned the flurry that plastered his men's sodden, tatterdemalion cloaks to their lean, hungry forms. He was a ship's prow in a roiling sea. The buffeting waves would cleave to _him_!

His ardour compelled. Held his men rapt to his purpose.

"Instead, like a coward, he hides behind an army of men he has suborned from their duty. In lieu of faithful service to the Empire, he threatens our homes, our security, our very lives. You have seen that where our Empress is shelter and succour, our shepherdess, he is the wolf that preys upon the flock. You have only to look at the charnel house he made of Ancarid, at the war of burning and despoiling he has engaged us with after Asinbayar. Without such abhorrent tactics, we would have prevailed already and thrown him down.

Across that field, there they stand. The Usurper and his men! They hope that we will turn back and starve in the lands they have burned behind us. They know our _damane_ have not the strength to allow us to withdraw by Gateway. Don't they make a brave sight? Toy soldiers from a child's play-box, aren't they fair to look upon? Unlike us, they haven't spent a season marching and fighting. They are not real soldiers. They are not real _men_! Men do not make war upon women and children." Uthair spat the scornful words, pausing before ramming his point home forcefully.

"They are a bonny sight, preening in dress coats of green and red – coats they do not have a right to wear. The green of the earth they have despoiled. The red of the blood of true men, shed to shield the Empire. _Our_ colours. _Our_ land. _Our_ blood. These traitors hope the mere sight of them will turn us from our path. They think we must retreat. We're outnumbered, starving, weary and worn with care. Stouthearts, I need not hide the truth from you. But I'm _done_ running. Not when we are so close." Uthair urged them.

He saw backs straighten, fists tighten their grip on sword-haft and spear-shaft. A sea of bloodless faces, eyes tight, jaws clenched with tension. Not fear. _Determination._ Men psychologically readying themselves to kill. Who knew exactly what it was to look into the eyes of somebody who was trying to slay them, before stealing away their life at the point of sword or dagger. Who had done so before, and walked away, and lived with that reality. These men were not the voluble sort. Their sharpened steel spoke well enough on their behalf.

"It ends today! Right here. Right now." Uthair demanded of them. "Behind those men is the high road to Seandar. Beef, wine, and a soft feather bed. And a willing woman to share it with if you're able! Me, I'm a mere beardless boy – too callow and tired for shenanigans. But I'm sure you lot have the indefatigable prowess to not leave the ladies of Seandar unsatisfied!"

 _Ah Uthair,_ another part of his mind grieved, as he saw his men exchange glances, grinning unabashed at the simple promise of food and sleep. The warmth of a woman's embrace. _What have you become?_ He knew that for many of these men, they would take their rest in no feather bed, but lie forever cold under the winter sky. Maybe for all of them, himself included. Uthair hardened his heart. _Some of them,_ he reminded himself. _Or all of them._ The White Boar was a cruel foe. He gave no amnesty to his enemies.

Hiding behind the smiles and resolve, he saw another truth in the faces of these warriors. His men knew, just as surely as he did. They might be younglings, but they were children no more. They had the grace to treat Uthair's inducement as part gallows humour, part aspiration. _Tai'shar Aldael._

They deserved better than an orator's tricks. Something real. Something of what he was, something of what they shared as a brotherhood. The better part of him, rising above his ambition, his need to prove himself.

"Are you frightened, lads? I know I am" he told them, honestly. "My bladder is full, and my arsehole puckered tight, just like yours. The enemy are many and we are so few. A lot of us are going to die today. Maybe all of us, down to the last man. That's on me.

I led us here to this grim place, where the road ahead forks, and we choose our path. Either the pass to Seandar, or the highway to the Source of All. But my heart… my heart is light. Because I'm more afraid of living a thrall's bondage under a Lightless tyrant like Handoin than of dying a free man. If today is my last day, I will fall knowing I remembered my duty to the end. That's all a man can do.

Look to your left, and your right" Uthair ordered. "Your messmates. Their lives are in your hands. _That's_ who you're fighting for! Nobody who hasn't been what we've been through could ever understand that bond. You're not fighting for _me_. You're fighting for _us._ Something those brigand bastards yonder will never understand. Something they cannot kill!

Look at them! They are _nothing_. For all their numbers, they cower there. They _fear_ us. They are right to do so. We have prevailed against them a dozen times. They own no weapon so potent as the spirit that inflames our breast!"

Uthair took a deep breath, raising his voice in a clarion call, high and fair.

"Either a famous victory, or a _worthy_ death!" his voice thundered, impassioned with a young man's virtuous certainty. " _Worthy._ Not glorious – though it will certainly be that, too. The last gift of a free man. A sacrifice that men will wonder at. They may forget our names – but they will _never_ forget why we stood here. What we sought to accomplish! The magnificence of our bequest!

 _Death is a feather_." Uthair finished, quietly, no longer hectoring. "Or so I was told by the men who trained me. Who forged me into what I am. Death is nothing to fear. There's a truth.

Sometimes, though, a man's death can mean something more than a cessation of struggle. Redemption. The apotheosis of his life under the Light. _That_ is what's waiting for us over there – beyond the enemy's spears."

There was no cheer of acclamation to follow Uthair's words. None was needed. He saw the change his words had wrought in the way they held themselves. How they seemed to stand a little taller. Proud that their unswerving commitment had proven worthy of his notice.

Where he led, they followed. That was the covenant between them. His blood for theirs, and theirs for his. They knew his shortcomings, knew that they would likely die for his mistakes, and they were still willing to follow his orders, come what may.

They humbled him.

The Light send that he would prove worthy of that trust.

His Lieutenant, Tylee Khirgan approached his side. The tall woman's hair was snow-white now, her scarred face bearing the hallmarks of age with a dignity and experience that shaded warm insubordination as she caught Uthair's gaze. She had taught him his craft. Now there was a reminiscing glint in her eye, almost a fondness.

"Glad you got that out of the way, General. I _hate_ making speeches. Goatsons never bloody well listen to me anyway. Just look bored, yawn a bit, and scratch their privates. Then ask me when they're getting paid for the hundredth time." she commented archly. "I suppose if somebody finally kills me today, they'll be doing me a favour. My bones ache."

Uthair laughed, a rarity. "Lieutenant General, I think the reason Death keeps passing you up is even _Casin Hob_ would find you a gristly morsel! Have you heard back from the _raken_ patrol scouting to our rear?"

Tylee nodded, and lowered her voice. "Yes – and none of it good. There's two enemy forces marching from Nirendad to catch us in the rear from East and West. Each are the match of ours in number.

The ones coming from the West are Fairhand's rabble, and they're within an hour's hard march of us. Three thousand foot, five hundred auxiliaries. A dozen _damane._ Thank the Light they have no _raken_ or _lopar._ The other army are a day away. Doesn't matter. This'll be over before they get here, one way or the other. There's something else, too. A column of refugees out of Nirendad, between us and Fairhand, heading our way. They're really close."

Uthair muttered volubly to himself under his breath. Tylee looked at him, her face opaque. "What was that you just said, General? Didn't quite catch it."

The young man laughed. "Just a little something my father once said in his private chambers – right after he tripped over his _ashanderei_ and spilt red wine down the front of Mother's white dress. Nobody swears quite as eloquently as Father. I was saving that choice saying up for a rainy day…..

Well, I guess that's that. Let's take Handoin if we can, and make a run for Seandar. Those refugees worry me though. That cowson Handoin doesn't scruple to lace a refugee column with _damane,_ or disguise his troops as civilians. Tylee, how close are they?"

"A quarter hour off, maybe."

"By the Light! Tylee, I need to _know_ what they are! Despatch a _raken_ – no, send five, and their complement of Fists. Send a _damane_ too. One that can make Sky Lights. If there are enemy amongst them, they won't kill the _raken_ immediately – they'll wait to slay us in detail. Fly low over the column. Tell them to pay especial attention to the women. Look for collars and leashes. If they spot enemy _damane_ , they are to get out of there and report immediately.

If not, land our _sul'dam_ to parlay. She is to demand that they turn back. Just seeing what she is should be enough. If it isn't, have her _damane_ disperse them. The Sky Lights and a bit of Power-amplified shouting should do the trick. Frighten them but don't hurt them!

If they truly are what they seem, there's nothing for them here. We can't protect them or feed them, and this is going to be a battlefield. We might be driving them into the arms of Fairhand, but there's not a lot we can do about that. We need to move, now! Every second we delay is a second wasted."

* * *

High Lord Handoin's eye raked the plain. A slight man, almost delicate, pale of skin, he disdained armour. Unlike the reckless boy he faced, he did not believe it the place of a general to fight in the ranks like a common soldier. Instead, he wore a brocaded robe of saffron-dyed silk, seeded with pearls. The high-collared garment was sodden, clinging clammy to him, its long brocaded train mud-bespattered. The White Boar disdained the cold's claim on him, refusing even the Swordsman's Embrace, the numbing Oneness.

A _so'jhin_ stood at his left hand, another at his right. The vassal to his left held a short, scabbarded sword in his outstretched arms, the wire-bound hilt extended towards his royal master, ready to be drawn. The servant on his right bore a short composite bow in one hand, protected from the elements in a tooled leather case, and a quiver of arrows in the other, the fletchings the same lustrous yellow as the Emperor's robe.

The White Boar was an adequate swordsman, no more, but an archer of high renown. The bow, and not the sword was a true nobleman's weapon. The heritage of a Northern High Lord. An idle thought scudded Handoin's mind, a bilious storm-cloud that darkened his brow. He had heard tell of the vaunted prowess of the Raven Prince, Mat Cauthon, and the franklin bowmen of his homeland, the Two Rivers over the Aryth Ocean. It irked him. In the proper order of things, only those of the Blood should have the right to bear the weapon. Crossbows and slings better befitted the lowly. Crude tools for rude hands.

The White Boar had endured the reign of the old Empress without rebellion. Barely. The dark skin she and Tuon both bore marked her as impure. Watered blood. Their lineage commingled with the Blood families of the South – loyalist families elevated for their service to the Empire. No matter that her family genealogy proclaimed her to have a better claim than his, she was indubitably base-bred. Part-animal! Her black face confirmed it past a doubt. Why, there were rumours of _marath'damane_ in her family line! But Handoin bided his time.

When Fortuona had declared herself Empress, her record of failure and folly had proved her unworthy. _Tainted blood will out._ The last straw had been her marriage to a commoner, a barbarian. A love-match! How squalid! It showed her to be a mere rutting animal, ruled only by what was between her legs. Weakness compounding weakness. So he'd struck, to save the Empire from its degeneracy and ruin.

He'd allied with the Southerners, an irony considering his foe's heritage. The Southrons were easy to gull, to manipulate. At this time, the alliance served both their ends. But they could not conceive of the scope of his final aims. Handoin intended to eradicate the cancer of racial mixing in Seanchan forever. When he was done, every single negro would be _da'covale_ or dead. Purified, renewed – only then would the Seanchan be truly one people, united in purpose, to fulfil their manifest destiny.

The breeze stirred, rippling the banner he stood under – a white boar rampant on a sable field – distracting him from his thoughts.

The enemy was stirring, too. Their _raken_ were aloft, circling raggedly. _Birds of ill-omen._ The White Boar could see the unmistakeable signs of men gathering into ranks, readying for battle. He allowed himself a tight smile. The mulatto boy, Uthair was possessed of a certain raw cunning, and proven tenacity. But then, even a dog was possessed of a brute's unthinking courage, was it not? This dog's day was done. He would send his head to his mother.

Handoin smiled coldly. Ay, he knew his reputation as a pitiless foe, and the name bestowed upon him by his enemies – though none dared to utter it in his presence. _The Bloody Boar._ Truth to tell, he favoured the sobriquet over any fawning epithet his courtiers had coined to flatter him. It was a name well-earned. He _revelled_ in it, by the Light!

Terror was a weapon. None more potent. Fear, the key to impregnable keeps and strong-walled towns, who opened their gates to him, capitulating without a blow struck or arrow fired.

Reputation mattered.

The Bloody Boar had ten thousand here, twice what his enemy had to throw at him. He had a score of _damane_ , fresh and ready, primed to kill. He only regretted he had neither _raken_ nor the beasts of war at his disposal. Handoin had lost all his _raken_ at Asinbayar, when Uthair had come for him like a jackal in the night, killing the raptors and their handlers before they had managed to struggle aloft.

Yet Asinbayar had been a defeat that Handoin had been happy to take when he saw the damage he had inflicted on Uthair's army. Another victory like that would beggar his headstrong young rival! The lack of _raken_ left Handoin blind – but then what need of scouts when your enemy decided to come at you head-on?

A blind boar could still gore.

In lieu of the _lopar_ and _grolm,_ he had two thousand superb heavy cavalry, man and horse barded in steel, and five hundred light lancers – Goong Sul tribesmen from the arctic tundra to the far north of Imfaral. Uncompromising men. Barbarians, yes, but useful for all that!

In truth, Handoin preferred his cavalry over the war-beasts anyway, putting his trust in the reason of man against the savagery of beasts. These he had deployed at the rear, as a reserve. If Uthair managed some witchery, Travelling in behind him, or landed his light infantry to the rear as an airborne assault force, he would be in for a most unpleasant surprise. The Fists of Heaven were doughty fighters, but no match for a charge of armoured horse.

No, Handoin envisaged a straight infantry fight, and he had the numbers. He'd considered going after Uthair upon the expansive plain, unleashing his cavalry banners wide to clip the boy's wings for him. An idea he had abandoned, in the name of the pragmatism that had served him so well. He was confident but not certain of winning a fight on the field, whereas strategy told him he was secure here, impossible to dislodge, and every day he waited here was another day his enemy starved, another day for Fairhand and Eadain's forces to arrive in support.

The Bloody Boar held the pass with two over-strength Banners of infantry, each banked five men deep. The foremost regiment comprised his men-at-arms, armoured head to toe in steel plate, carrying halberds and pollarms. They were daunting to look upon, towering figures crowned with tall, insectile helms, threatening the enemy with a schiltrom of sharpened metal. The Banner positioned behind were light infantry, bearing falchions and rectangular shields, their flexible armour of lacquered bamboo durable and lightweight.

The pass was wide enough that his forces were able to match and better the standard width of Uthair's formation, including their armour. Handoin had considered planting a hedge of stakes in front, to protect his position from an assault by Uthair's heavy detachments – the _grolm_ in particular, which he had a healthy regard for. He had decided against it. It would have left him unable to easily go forward if an opportunity presented itself to him. There was such a thing as being _too_ cautious.

Stationed behind these, he had a banner of crossbowmen, and then upon a grassy knoll, he had set his White Boar standard, where he himself stood with two hundred human Deathwatch Guards, his household infantry. As this escarpment offered the best vantage point, he also stationed his _damane_ here, where they could dominate the battlefield with the One Power.

The enemy were closing rapidly. Close enough now that Handoin could distinguish their deployment. Standard formation. Infantry in the centre, _s'redit_ massing behind. _Grolm_ on the flanks. Archers in the rear. _Raken_ screening his assault.

The Bloody Boar felt a frisson of contempt as he regarded his adversary's paltry forces, his transparent attempts to paper over his numerical disadvantage by stretching his lines. _Is that all you have, boy?_

An imperious wave of Handoin's arm motioned his crossbowmen forward, beyond their infantry. "Shoot down their _raken_ when they come" he ordered their Captain. "Then target their foot. Don't bother trying to bring down their _grolm._ A crossbow bolt will only annoy them. Let the _damane_ take care of them."

A coldhearted gambit, straight from the _sha'rah_ board – sacrificing a pawn to take the only enemy piece truly capable of threatening the Fisher King.

There was only one king on this board – as the young claimant yonder was about to learn to his abiding sorrow!

As Uthair's forces closed, the White Boar's eye narrowed. He could see there were far fewer _raken_ than he had been led to believe. Handoin swore under his breath, belatedly wishing he had not sent his bowmen forward. His crossbowmen would still die when Uthair's infantry charged, but there weren't enough enemy _raken_ to make the exchange worthwhile.

Handoin shrugged. It galled him, but ultimately didn't matter.

The enemy raptorsoverhead were ungainly, slow, their formation ragged. At twice arrow-range the flying beasts accelerated, streaming forward towards his lines.

Why were there so few of them?

Just outside of bowshot, they pulled up, the _morat'raken_ riders throwing flares from the saddle before wheeling away. Sputtering crimson, spewing a contrail of amber sparks, the projectiles tumbled lazily to earth. Where they landed, instead of exploding, clogging white smoke belched forth, obscuring the battlefield and Uthair's troop deployment.

Handoin cursed. "Get the _damane_ to clear that mess away. I need to see!" he demanded. Just then, in his peripheral vision, he spotted telltale dark specks in the air, on both flanks, high above the mountains. _That_ was where the black savage's air force was. He'd been outfoxed, which irked him, but it should be no more than an irritant. "Get word to my Master of Horse to make ready for an assault upon our rear. Fists of Heaven and _raken._ The rest of you, eyes front. Flanks, push pikes. Make ready to receive armour!"

A stormfront of Air from Handoin's _damane_ cleared his line of sight, dispelling the acrid smoke from the incendiary devices. What he saw sent a thrill of apprehension tingling down the nape of his neck.

Instead of matching him man for man across the pass's width, Uthair's forces were now arrayed in a vicious chevron, a ballista bolt aimed squarely for his heart! The young general's sleight-of-hand had also reversed the array, the impeccably-drilled troops of the Winged Hammer changing formation in a hundred heartbeats as crisply as a cardsharp shuffling a deck of playing cards. _Grolm_ in the centre, the tip of the spear, flanked by infantry.

Handoin only had eyes for the terrible beasts rampaging forward. They were frighteningly quick, outstripping their flanking infantry, closing to half bow-shot range before a single arrow was fired by the panicked crossbowmen, who were cruelly exposed.

Understanding of their plight came swiftly for the doomed auxiliaries. That was understandable, Handoin knew. Perhaps even forgivable. Their indiscipline was not. Milling in dismayed disarray, several of the edgy crossbowmen loosed ill-aimed quarrels into the teeth of the _grolm_ charge – a flagrant flouting of his express command. By the Light! If any survived, he would have them _crucified!_

Worse was to follow. When the crossbowmen saw the result of their volley – arrows glancing harmlessly from the leathery carapace of the onrushing beasts without apparent effect – they broke and ran, streaming back towards Handoin's infantry lines.

In their desperation to escape, they sought to shoulder their way through the heavy infantry, disorganising the tight-packed unity of their formation, the immaculately-constructed phalanx that was the foot-soldier's only defence against an onslaught of heavy armour.

"NOOOOOOO!" an appalled Handoin screamed to his infantry bannerman, his hackles standing upon end, cold perspiration running down his back as he realised the enormity of what was about to happen. "Kill the archers, you bloody fool! Hold the line, burn you!" But it was too late. The pike formation was ruined, replaced by a mob, a milling amalgamation of infantry and crossbowmen, sweating and wide-eyed with fear.

 _Forget about them. They are dead anyway._ Handoin grabbed a frightened _sul'dam_ by her hair, shouting in her face. "Kill the _grolm._ Do it now!"

Handoin turned to the _so'jhin_ ,wrenching his warbow from the fellow's grasp, case and all, casting the leather cover impatiently aside. The composite bow required great power to draw, a strength beyond most men, diligently earned at the practise butts and the chase.

The High Lord planted the ivory tip of the bamboo-wood bowstave upon the ground, flexing the stave and stringing her in a single savage motion. The plucked string thrummed like _Shai'tan_ 's harp, a low, glossy note. That was well.

The bow would help him find much-needed serenity.

Handoin found the Flame and the Void, emotion shut out like a closing door. At one with the bow, attuned to the imperceptible resonances of the bow's deep belly.

The High Lord selected a long bodkin arrow, nocking and drawing in a fluid motion, economy of effort, fletchings to his cheek. He was one with the battle, one with the charging beasts, his feet sure upon the ground despite the almighty thundering of the _grolm's_ pounding hooves. At one with the _grolm_.

One with his subjects. Handoin's rabble of heavy infantry and crossbowmen were induitably dead men walking. Before a single enemy combatant had fallen, Uthair had already exacted a steep price for final victory. Uthair, and his own mismanagement, Handoin recognised, all hubris set aside. But victory was yet assured, as long as he stood to lead his men.

As the _ko'di_ centered him, the White Boar found a brief measure of respect for his young antagonist. Realised that he would have felt cheated had this proved too easy. _Enemy, I salute you. You were worthy! I shall be stronger for having faced you. Better prepared for the challenges that lie ahead._

But Handoin still intended to draw first blood, however symbolic the gesture.

At two hundred yards, the High Lord loosed his first shaft, reaching for another as soon as the arrow left the string, his breath in perfect synchronization with the rhythm of his archery. In through the nose, out through the mouth, exhaling as the arrow left the silken bowcord.

The White Boar did not tarry to watch his shafts in flight, just acquired his next target, drew, shot. His third arrow was in the air as his first shaft transfixed the centre eye of a charging grolm, turning its surprisingly graceful trefoil gallop into a tumbling ruin, and his subsequent shafts unerringly found their targets. This deep in the Void, Handoin was beyond hubris. Beyond satisfaction.

Metronomic, unruffled, Handoin reached for a fourth arrow – and then the ground behind him exploded, a gouting fountain of Earth and Fire, the concussion of the blast hurling him to the ground, his bow spilling from his grasp. The Void shattered about him, fragmented like a suit of armour made of glass.

The warlord lay stricken, struggling to fill his lungs. Shock annihilated thought, left him blinking and dazed. Only wrath remained, a fury that shook his frame as a terrier shakes a rat. Blood ran down his shaven scalp, filled his mouth.

His flesh was afire! Skin abraded raw, his haughty saffron silks liberally soiled with mud, tattered rags clinging to him, Handoin had no idea if his wounds were serious. The Bloody Boar was past caring about such trivialities! His keening lust for immediate, bloody vengeance – to repay cut for cut and stripe for stripe – the only imperative that mattered!

Hands clenching into knotted fists, Handoin rolled onto his side, taking in the sight of his _sul'dam_ and _damane_ fighting for their lives, wild-eyed, hands gesticulating as they threw weaves against an unknown foe. It looked absurd as they battled an unseen enemy in total silence. A mime of tragedy.

He groped his way to his knees, disoriented, the world askew, reeling about him drunkenly. Placing a finger to his right ear, it came away bloody. _Ruptured eardrum_. The proximity to the explosion had deafened him.

With the battle in the balance, it was vital that he be _seen_! Fighting nausea, his gorge heaving, Handoin shambled to his feet. He had been reduced to a mere spectator! How could he command if he could not understand what was going on?

Tears of impotent wrath seared the Bloody Boar's cheeks as he screamed soundlessly, hoping his mouth was shaping the words he intended for his Captain-General, gesticulating helplessly at his own useless ears as he did so. "DEAFENED BY EXPLOSION. TAKE COMMAND." His infantry captain nodded determinedly, replying with words Handoin couldn't hear. _Cretin!_

The High Lord looked down, saw his bow had broken when he fell upon it, and turned instead to his sword-bearer, dragging free the broad cleaver-like blade. The familiar heft of the weapon in his hand steadied him. He couldn't lead, but he could still fight. _Lusted_ to fight! To lay about him with the heavy blade and hack down lesser men! The veneer of civility stripped away, the White Boar wanted to exorcise his fear and anger in a welter of gore. _Blood ran true._

To the crows with serenity!

* * *

Tylee Khirgan leapt from _raken_ -back as the beast swooped in to disgorge its fighters. Her aged bones protested the ungentle landing, just outside of bowshot of the enemy. The winged reptile didn't land, just swept in with its belly brushing the ground and struggled back aloft as soon as it had dismounted the soldiers.

With a yell, the rider tugged the reins, pressing his heels into his mount's sides, and with an ear-piercing screech, the _raken_ began to accelerate, wings thrashing hard as it struggled to gain altitude.

Tylee surveyed the battleground, assessing. Her shock troops were hurrying, rallying upon her to get in formation for an assault.

Looking at the enemy, she saw the eventuality she had feared the most. Armoured horse. Thousands of them. And light lancers from Shon Klear. They would tear her light infantry apart! Already, the enemy cavalry were forming, a study in deliberate menace as they ordered their lines, lowering their visors.

The cavalry commander was a little green, Tylee thought. A more seasoned man would have just wheeled and attacked posthaste, rather than dressing his formations as if they were performing exercises upon the parade ground.

His hesitation bought her vital seconds. Time she would use. "Fists of Heaven. On me!" She would go forward rather than stand there and wait to be massacred. There was no terrain to exploit, no broken ground where they could stand against a charge of heavy horse.

Then the ground erupted beneath the hooves of the nearest horsemen, a geyser of Air and Earth gouting skywards with a grinding roar, downing horse and rider. Her _damane_ had joined the assault. _Good for them._ Tylee hadn't expected much from her channellers, pushed to the limits of their endurance as they were.

An ear-splitting siren began to sound, warbling like the Dark One's trumpet. A simple weave of Air, the effort of an exhausted but quick-thinking _damane_ , pushed past her physical limits, doubtless lacking the strength for the power-intensive surges of Earth and Fire that would harrow an enemy formation, but possessing the wit to find the means to throw the enemy cavalry into chaos.

It spooked the horses as effectively as a charge of _grolm._ Horses bolted, threw their riders. Pandemonium reigned. An opportunity!

Tylee's gauntleted hand found her sword hilt, drew the businesslike short blade. "Follow me! Let's go kill the bastards before they kill us!" she barked, and with that they charged. "For the Throne and the Light!"

It was still insanity. A thousand light infantry against two thousand heavy horse. Long odds. Her few _damane_ now had problems of their own, fighting desperately against the enemy's channellers.

Just before they hit the milling, disorganised horsemen, Tylee's troops found some unexpected aid, the _raken_ overflight strafing the cavalry with incendiary devices. Dragon's Eggs, one of Aludra's black powder weapons. Explosions raked the enemy armour, flat, hard concussions of sound that accompanied dull amber conflagrations that blossomed amidst the Usurper's ranks.

The ruddy warmth of black powder detonations contrasted the piercing afterglare of splintering lightning as the _damane_ strove for dominance, a syzygy of coruscating energy that rendered everything else pallid by contrast, a light that saturated the eyes and turned day to a night of silhouettes and leaping shadows.

Tacking and weaving desperately overhead in evasive manoeuvres, _raken_ were still being blasted from the sky by fireballs, or snatched to the ground by lightning by the handful, but they pressed their relentless attack regardless, swooping over the defenders to assault the hillock where the Usurper had planted his banner. A murder of crows, mobbing their prey.

The _raken_ died to buy Uthair's _damane_ a much-needed respite, and just as importantly, to ensure the massed _grolm_ charge stood a chance of breaking through. A _raken_ winged by a fireball hurled by an enemy _damane_ screamed an unearthly cry as it plummeted, trailing a plume of smoke. But even as it fell, the determined rider kept the reins steady, aiming the flying lizard for the heart of the enemy. Where Handoin's banner flew and where his _damane_ stood.

The sledgehammer weight of the dying _raken_ and its mount bulled unerringly into the midst of the Deathwatch Guard, bowling them over like ninepins. The _morat'raken_ was badly scorched, his face beneath his brass-bound crystal goggles a ghastly charred horror, and his cloak aflame, but there was a mordant smile upon his face.

Clutched tightly in his left hand, held away from the flames, was a bag containing a half dozen Dragon's Eggs. His right hand was extended, showing the shocked Deathwatch Guards a defiant middle finger. With a grunt of effort, he hugged the bag of explosives to his breast, into the midst of the fires that were licking at his clothing, consuming him.

The detonation was apocalyptic. The Deathwatch Guard, the _raken_ and the rider it bore simply ceased to be. In their place was a rapidly-expanding fireball, propelling the arrowhead-sharp shrapnel the fragmentation grenades were packed with at several times the speed of sound.

The _damane_ and their Leash Holders were harrowed by the stormfront of flying metal, and all killed except for one foresighted enough throw a protective shield of Air in the way. By chance, her quick thinking saved the life of her Commander, who stood immediately in front of her and was covered by the shield. For the second time in the battle, High Lord Handoin was thrown to the earth, and this time he was rendered senseless.

At the same instant, the charging _grolm_ plowed into the Usurper's disorganized infantry. The green-skinned reptiles, honking and bellowing with rage, bludgeoned the intermingled foot and crossbowmen. There had been a hundred _grolm_ at the outset. Now there were ninety-seven, a mere three having fallen to the archery of Handoin himself. The _damane_ who had been tasked with destroying them had instead been assailed themselves.

The terrible lizards made landfall across a fifty-yard sector of the front line, and the blood-crazed predators rampaged through the mob of men. Chitinous beaks shredded flesh, horny hooves kicked and trampled. Gobbets of meat were torn from living men and tossed into the air. A single _grolm_ was an armoured juggernaut the size of a great bear running on all fours. A pack of the reptiles, galloping faster than a charging horse was an irresistible force. An avalanche made flesh.

The olive-green skin of the _grolm_ , scaled like a dragon, was harder than baked leather. Those few men with the wit to hack at the beasts found their armour all but impregnable. Iron swordblades bent and buckled stabbing flesh as hard as stone. The infantry crumpled under the impact, their line bowing inward until the centre met the resistance of the men of the second Banner behind them.

It was these men, the Northern falxmen, who had the hardihood to do what their heavily-armoured compatriots could not, linking their shields and standing their ground. In this they were aided by the _grolm's_ voracious nature. Many of the great beasts did not press on, content to hunt down fleeing men or bite into corpses.

But the respite did not last long. Pouring into the breach the _grolm_ had forced came the towering forms of a line of _s'redit._ Like ambulating houses, their curved tusks lethal ivory sickles six feet in length, the boar-horses paced on implacably, their long, prehensile trunks swaying ponderously. Astride their broad grey backs, castles of timber had been erected. These were packed with Uthair's crossbowmen, bearing their dreaded repeating crossbows.

With a whirr and clatter of cranks, the crossbowmen commenced firing at a hundred yards, spitting a continuous rain of death into the lightly-armoured infantry of the second line.

The beasts themselves assaulted the heavy infantry, funnelling outwards, widening the breach the _grolm_ had made. _S'redit_ were not as impervious to harm as a _grolm,_ but they more than made up for it in their intelligence and tractability. The blare of their trumpeting was sonorous, appalling, rising above the screams and cries of the dying and the explosions as _damane_ ripped the earth apart under their foes' feet and brought down the hammer of lightning upon them.

The Usurper's light infantry, assailed by _grolm_ and withered by arrow fire, did not break, but retreated in good order, step by step, grudgingly. Their captain had the foresight to have issued his troops with war-darts – foot-long shanks of iron, their barbed heads weighted with lead – and they peppered the _s'redit_ with a deterrent volley, aiming for the sensitive skin of the boar-horses' faces and trunks.

The _s'redit_ handlers turned their charges aside, seeking easier prey rather than risk their beasts becoming enraged, and running uselessly amok _. Seanchan light infantry, the best in the world_ , thought Uthair with grudging admiration, as he watched the conflict unfold from the back of a _s'redit_ in the second line.

That decision consigned the White Boar's forsaken heavy pikemen to obliteration as Uthair's heavy infantry hit them left and right – longswordsmen to the fore, two-handed blades carving deep into the heart of the Usurper's disintegrating pike-squares. Not a fair fight, not with the milling _grolm_ free to attack their rear and the _s'redit_ trampling unchecked through their wrecked centre, rolling them up. It was a grievous waste of life, even if they were rebels, but there was nothing to be done. No possibility of offering them parole, with the sides so closely enmeshed in battle.

Meanwhile, the enemy light infantry banner – five thousand men – had drawn up protecting the escarpment upon which the Usurper had raised his banner. Uthair eyed them appraisingly, watching with interest as the disciplined warriors dressed their formation. Lightly-armoured they might be, but that scarcely mattered, since each man bore a stout oblong shield – a shell of convex steel, wrapped round with layer upon layer of incredibly tough, lightweight silk that was proof against any arrow.

The front rank knelt, holding their grounded shields out in front of them. The second rank angled their shields to interlock above those of the front line, to deflect incoming arrows. The next two ranks held their shields squarely overhead. Their formation bristled with sharpened forge steel. Uthair muttered an oath. The enemy still had more men than he possessed in his whole army! It was going to be a pain to dislodge them. Even with _grolm_ and _s'redit_ to bear the brunt of the burden.

The White Boar standard no longer flew upon the hillock's summit, and Uthair wondered if the enemy general was fighting elsewhere. There was no evidence of _damane_ activity, either from his channellers or Handoin's. A better outcome than he could possibly have hoped for. It was time to draw breath, consolidate, while he mopped up the remnants of his enemy's men-at-arms. He hoped Tylee was still alive, still fighting.

* * *

Tylee Khirgan and the Fists of Heaven pitched into the disorganised enemy cavalry while their captains vainly yelled orders and riders struggled to control their terrified mounts. That still made it a losing fight. The horsemen, clad in their carapace of steel, were well-nigh invulnerable, the riders swinging maces and axes from the high saddles, clubbing crushing blows down upon the infantry hacking up at them.

Tylee rammed her short-sword into a horseman's groin, and was butted by his horse for her pains. The dying rider slid bonelessly from the saddle as the warrior woman punched the big gelding in the head in retaliation, landing a heavy blow with her steel-backed gauntlets. The riderless horse screamed, rearing, breaking free of the fight and galloping away.

She was bleeding, somewhere under her armour. Didn't know how bad. Some son of a sow had clouted her in the ribs with a mace and it hurt every time she breathed. _The pain is good news_ , she told herself. _Means you're still alive_. She had done him proper, though. Sword up under the armpit. Tylee wheezed with the effort of fighting, taking advantage of the respite.

The Fists fought in pairs tackling the horsemen. Her sword-sister was a scrap of a girl, who'd been wittering some nonsense earlier to anyone who would listen about having been raised to the Blood. _Airhead!_ But to give her credit, she had commendable pluck, and they were both still alive, which meant the other woman had been attending to her job, watching Tylee's back. She gave the lass a grin, more of a grimace than a smile, and received a weary thumbs-up in response. The youngling, her face ashen under the grime of battle, looked all-in. No rest for either of them though. Once you twist a _torm_ by the tail, best you hold on for all you're worth!

In the lull, Tylee realised that the enemy were no longer struggling to break and kill her troops, but fighting in order to extricate themselves from the combat. To withdraw. As other Fists of Heaven drew the same conclusion, taking a wary backwards step, the enemy cavalry disengaged themselves from the melee with infinite care, edging east, then north, cantering away, skirting the fighting.

Best not to press a beaten enemy. Not unless you truly wished to find out how hard he could fight with his back to the wall. Desperate men were dangerous.

The enemy falxmen, knowing the battle was lost, elected to follow after, peeling away by the company from both ends of the defensive line in good order, presenting a convex curve to the threat of the enemy _grolm_ and _s'redit_ ,as they enfiladed into a hollow oblong, a box of shields which bristled with sharp ironware.

This formation condensed into a marching column, a dense rectangle of men almost as broad as it was long, which tramped stoically Northward, following their cavalry from the field.

Their progress was necessarily slow, at first, the rearmost men facing about in case Uthair's forces launched a sudden assault, but once they drew clear, their pace increased, a swiftly-moving echelon of men pouring North away from the battle. The rebels had been beaten, and were retreating from the field. The Fists of Heaven watched them grimly. There was no energy for taunting them, nor for cheering their own victory.

It was then that Tylee's legs gave way beneath her, and she passed gratefully into a darkness, where there was neither pain nor exhaustion.

* * *

Uthair's attention had been so consumed by the action ahead of him that he was almost oblivious to the _morat'raken_ tugging at his sleeve. Irritably he swung upon the man, pushing back the towering praying-mantis helm he wore that he could better hear the scout's words.

"General! The men you sent to our rear, the _raken_ patrol encountered the column of 'refugees' a half-hour from here.

High Lord, just as you suspected, it was a trap! There were at least a half-dozen _damane_ in the column, and the rest were fighting men. Infantry. Not folk fleeing their homes. They killed our _damane,_ and threw our _raken_ downfrom the skies. Only I alone made it back here, and my Mari sore stricken by their witch's fire. She was as fast as the West Wind, and now she is slain."

The _raken-_ rider's face was etched with grief, as well it might be. The bond they forged with their steeds was a lifelong one, and once bonded, a _raken_ would not suffer another to ride him.

Uthair was stricken by terrible fear, his heart frozen in his breast. Not of defeat, but of losing the lives of his valiant men at the moment of their victory. The apotheosis of all their sacrifice and struggle. "Go!" he commanded. "Bid my Captain of Air mount up and take with him all that he has. Load up with Dragon's Eggs and fly south until he interdicts this column.

Send my Companion Cavalry after him. Attack them, and do not cease until they are destroyed, or until I bring up reinforcements when I can spare them from here. The fate of our whole army hangs in the balance!"

Anger flared up in his breast as he glared balefully north. Handoin was defeated in detail, his army retreating North apace, but too many of his own troops were still engaged and so he could spare nobody. Biting off an oath, he flexed his articulated gauntlets, making a closed, bloodless fist. "Kill those ambushing reptiles!"

A long half hour had passed. The Nadin Gap was carpeted by the dead, lain where they had fallen. The bleached grasses tinted crimson, stained with unhallowed blood, which pooled blackly and dried upon the crack-paved, parched soil. There were corpses strewn as far as the eye could see, with a great levee in the centre of the pass, a high-tide mark where the _grolm_ had ripped the heart out of Handoin's forces.

Uthair's heavy infantry stood in their formations, breathing hard, keeping a wary eye on the few _grolm_ who picked amongst the bodies. Hulking forms that slunk hungry amongst the corpses. It would take some time to corral the beasts, giving them time to glut themselves. You didn't interrupt a _grolm_ over its kill.

As Uthair watched, one of the three-legged scavengers stooped its massive head, crushing bill clipping off a man's arm at the shoulder, worrying at the cold meat with vigorous shakes of its massive head until the limb was freed from the rope of ligaments and sinews tethering it to the torso of the cadaver, before gulping down its prize.

Once, such sights would have horrified the youth. Emptied his stomach, too, most like. Now it just left him cold. The transient thrill of combat, of victory dissipated quickly, too. Uthair just felt empty. Bereft. He had won, again, but the cost had been ruinous. His army was broken, bled white. He might have won the battle, but he had lost the war. They would retreat into Seandar, and prepare for a siege. It would be left to others to prosecute the war. To relieve him, if they could.

There was worse. A terrible, unforgivable mistake had been made. Somehow, the _raken_ scouts he had sent missed the column of refugees they sought, stumbling instead upon Fairhand's army. Fairhand's _damane_ had attacked them on sight, and the one flyer who had escaped had erroneously reported to him that the refugee column was a trap.

In a moment of distraction, in the heat of battle, Uthair had taken the report at face value. Believing that there was an enemy army masquerading as refugees fleeing Nirendad a bare handful of minutes away from falling upon the rear of his exhausted forces as they fought Handoin, he had ordered an assault with elements of his air-force and his mounted Deathwatch Guard.

Labouring under that misapprehension, he despatched forces to attack the 'refugee column', those wolves in sheep's clothing, to forestall their arrival on the battlefield.

Even then his mistake might have been mitigated, if the troops he'd sent had found Fairhand's forces. They hadn't. Instead, they swooped down upon the real refugees.

They had been thorough, exactingly carrying out his orders. Waves of _raken_ attacks swooping high overhead, dropping incendiary petards. Explosions ripping through the huddle of terrified non-combatants. Fires kindling in the dry grasses. It had been only a matter of moments before they realised their terrible mistake, encountering none of the expected resistance, but only seeing frightened people scattering like quail in all directions, but by then it was far too late.

Those survivors who had fled in this direction had made it as far as the battlefield, where they huddled in abject terror, too exhausted to flee, flinching whenever a soldier looked at them. They had been deaf to any words offering them safety. Uthair didn't blame them. Haunted wraiths, their clothing smeared with dirt and ash, staring eyes reliving the horror. He'd ordered that the last of his quartermaster's stores and all their spare bedding and blankets be distributed to them – everything but their tents. His men didn't need them. They would be in Seandar by nightfall. It wasn't enough. Nothing would ever be enough.

In all two thousand refugees had died. No, those words were too clean. Had been _murdered._ By him. He would not blame his men. They were the arm, his the will that directed it.

He should feel _something_!

Uthair tore off his helm and hurled it to the ground, where it rolled away with a hollow clang. Unbuckled his swordbelt – sword, scabbard and all – from about his waist and hurled them after it. The Power-wrought sword that was his most prized possession, a nameday gift from his Mother, thrown away like refuse. He wished he'd never seen it. Uthair slumped to the earth, staring fixedly at the ground. He felt the weight of accusing eyes looking at him. Judging.

A pair of riders in the dark livery of the Deathwatch Guard approached him, one of them holding the reins of Uthair's horse. It was these men who had reported the scale of the massacre to him. "General, there is something you need to see," the fellow holding Uthair's horse addressed him, his voice atonal, muffled by his ant-like helm.

Uthair grunted with effort as he dragged himself to his feet, hauled himself into the saddle. He thought about reclaiming his helmet, his sword. Shouldered the notion aside with wearied anger. Let them lay where they were!

The Guardsmen accompanied him as he rode, picking their way through the battlefield. They crested the hillock where Handoin had planted his banner. The hilltop was burned and scorched, the topsoil ripped away, leaving a blackened scar, crusted with charred bodies and blackened shards of armour. Cresting the abridged brow of the rise, he saw what he had come to see.

There was another tideline of bodies – men and horses – charting the reeling, drunken struggle fought between the Fists of Heaven and Handoin's heavy horse. The battered survivors of his elite infantry regiment squatted amongst the charnel-house, too exhausted to rise. Five hundred men and women remaining from a complement of one thousand. _Too few_.

There was a girl, crouched hugging a broken body to her, that of an older woman. The girl had been weeping, her face scorched by her tears, but she was done crying now. The woman in her arms was old, too old, and she was too young.

Uthair dismounted, his legs shaky beneath him.

Death had not been kind to Tylee Khirgan, leaving her gaunt and grey, her features clenched in a snarl of effort. Lessening her. Without her soaring spirit marshalling it, her body was a husk, an old woman whose sightless eyes were milky, rheumy without her penetrating will to imbue them with shrewdness and pride. A stricken hawk, small and crumpled without the wind filling her wings.

In an incongruous moment, Uthair saw the young woman holding her was the girl he'd raised to the Blood before the battle. She turned a worried face upon him, frightened perhaps that he would hold her responsible. The girl made as if she would speak and he raised a hand to forestall her, to motion her aside. It took a monumental effort to raise his arm, to straighten his shoulders, as if he was carrying a _s'redit_ upon his back.

He knelt at her side. Closed Tylee's eyes. Rigor mortis had set in, there was nothing to be done about the cast of her face, the rictus of agony and strain. Somehow that made him angry. _Light, the dead deserved their rest!_

Uthair wanted to weep. Light, he _needed_ to weep, and damn the soldiers who watched, faces wooden, inscrutable! A part of him wouldn't permit it. Turned the condemnation he felt into a blade of ice he rammed deeper and deeper into his chest. Hate. For himself. He was accountable.

He had sent Tylee Khirgan here, placing her like a Stones piece in a part of the board to draw his enemy's eye and ire, and then abandoning her. S _he_ had known, he had seen it in her eyes. A strategic move. But in his heart, he hadn't been prepared for losing her. That old woman had been his mentor, his teacher, his friend – the only stable constant in a hostile, volatile world. He'd taken her for granted. Took her survival for granted, as a given. Loss was not a word in his lexicon. Now she had died for him and he was _alone._

A cold fury rose in him as he stood, looking down, and Uthair drew it about himself like a shroud, rage numbing him against his loss. Tylee had been more than friend, more than mentor. There had been no place in her heart of his mother the Empress for a son. Her training had determined that. _On the heights, the paths are paved with daggers._

Had he been born female, the Empress likely would have mentored him, guided him to be her successor. But there was no place for a male child – especially an eldest male child – who would only grow to be a threat, the natural antagonist to her eventual female heir. Yet he'd never begrudged Mother her studied diffidence until now. Instead, he'd thrown himself into a life of service to the Empire, into war. He'd been a man finding his calling.

Only now did he understand that the reason he'd felt no resentment was Tylee. The woman who had fostered him. Because of her, he'd never felt the lack of a mother's love. Now, he was alone. Isolated. Friendless. Fragmented. Lost. As _she_ had always intended it to be. The Empress.

He felt it crystallize in his heart, like the first snowflake of winter. A perfect, unique shard of hate.


	4. Chapter 4: The Undertow

**Chapter 4: The Undertow**

With her first taste of _saidar_ , the girl called Lilen Moiral had truly died, and another was born in her stead, though she maintained the name for decades after before taking another. The wilder Lilen learnt to master her talent slowly compared to other peers born with the spark, developing a block that had to be beaten out of her whilst she learned the hardest, most inimical art she would ever learn. Surrender to _saidar._ The female half of the One Power, the watercourse that drove the Wheel of Time.

There was a small stream, a beck near where Lilen lived. It wound its way playful and brisk between shepherding boulders speckled with lichen, between two grass banks, narrow enough that a reckless man on horseback could almost essay to leap it. _Almost._

In places, the waters were bridged by stepping-stones, a gamin's path set down by the Aelfinn or the Eelfinn perhaps, a child's hopscotch rendered in water-smoothed rock. Elsewhere, there were waterfalls, a couple of feet high, and in other reaches lay secluded pools, a brimming measure becalmed, where the watercourse appeared at its slowest, most languid and enticing. The waters in the gulch were cool and sweet, tempting in the sweltering summer. Yet even the cows and sheep gave the beck a wide berth.

Her pa had taken her there at the age of ten summers. He'd carried her upon his broad shoulders when she got tired, and she'd clasped her pudgy arms about his neck, rested her head against the bristles of his unshaven cheek. At length, they'd arrived, and he set her down, enfolding her small hand carefully in his large, callused one.

She'd remembered: how enticing the waters! How she'd wished to paddle in those mellifluous shallows, to feel the waters cool her fair skin, which was feeling the prickle of sunburn.

"There _are_ no shallows, Lilen." Her father's voice gruff in her ear as he squatted on his hunkers beside her. As stern as when he'd caught her playing with matches. Or the night she'd upset the tilly lamp and nearly burnt their place to the ground.

"There's a faultline in the ground here, a rift where the earth's split in two. The land's cleft, see, like two halves of a scone, with the river running between like the jam or cream or what-have-you."

His eyes, calm but tension in the character-wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, the slight increase of pressure in his hand upon hers.

"I say _river_ , not beck or stream, Lilen, because a river is what this is, truly. When the Strid Beck leaves these hills, it becomes the headwaters of a river a half-mile in breadth. Here, the Strid is a river turned on its side, do y' kennit? And nobody knows just how deep the waters truly run. Fathoms upon fathoms.

A man I know sought to plumb its depths with a stone tied to a string of yarn, to measure off the distance to the bottom. After a hundred yards, a surge beneath snapped the line – and almost pulled him in after it. _Nobody who has fallen into the Strid has ever been found again._ No matter how placid the waters look, there is an undertow like the clutch of the Dark One's fingers.

There are some that say the Strid is a rift in reality, the Made, the Pattern you kennit, and those it claims are unbound from the Wheel itself to wander eternity in the Outside Dark, the Unmade, disembodied, insane, beyond any hope of either salvation or rebirth."

Her Pa laughed, uneasily, unconvincingly, harrowing his free hand through his thinning fair hair apologetically. "What I mean to say is, this is not a place for your sporting. Do not come here, do not bring your friends. If you find yourself here, do _not_ sit watching the waters. They speak to you – can you hear them?"

And Lilen could. The Strid _was_ singing its old, sweet, innocuous song. Cajoling. Seducing. _Your old Pa's just trying to scare you with stories, Lilen. But you're a big girl now – you know better, don't you_? _It's cool in here, why not just dip your toes and forget your cares awhile?_ _Where's the harm?_

Just a little too eager, just a little too .. hungry, underneath. Like the slobbering of a rabid dog. Or was that her imagination?

"You remember, Lilen, about what I told you about taking gifts from strangers?" Lilen nodded, soberly, knowing she understood a little, enough, intuiting that there was an unpleasant, adult truth squirming underneath the reassuring solidity of her father's words. The high, ketotic scent of something redolent and spoiled – ripe and rank, like the body of a dead starling that she'd once found, mouldering under the floorboards. "You may think it foolish, but heed me all the same. The Strid – it tells lies, just like those stranger-folk. Mayhap you're too young for magic and belief, but heed me in this."

 _Saidar_ , the True Source. To Lilen, _saidar_ was ever like the Strid – placid above, but with a deadly undertow, currents that could rip body from soul, that could sunder the soul itself. Surrendering to _saidar_ was a life's work, channelling the flows a reeling, surefooted dance upon the crossing-stones. _Saidar_ was life and breath.

Her talent – the ability which now imprisoned her – unlocked by violence, had set her inexorably upon her path, though of course she had not intimated anything of that destiny, back when she was but human, a frightened little girl called Lilen Moiral. During the assault, Lilen had found something unexpected within herself, another potential unlocked by puberty. A left-handed gift, perhaps, to compensate for the unwanted physical changes that brought the attention of a predator.

It was as if a part of her had become a lens, concentrating her terror, her revulsion and her fury into one incandescent, roiling tumult of light and energy that raged out of her, from the nexus of her outstretched hand, joining her to him.

Her assailant swelled, trembling, tumescent under the riot of heat, and she was laughing at the release of it as her fire consumed him, incinerating him from the inside out. His skin split in a hundred thousand fissures, blackened and crackling like pork rind, the stink of it both sweet and acrid, clinging to her hair, scorching the air long after he was reduced to a fetal, twisted mannequin of blistered bones, writhing in the flames as it charred, until all that remained was fine white ash.

It was over in an instant, a heartbeat, but the womanwho once was a girl called Lilen savoured that moment, smooth and warm under her touch like a keepsake, though she had long forgotten the man's face.

* * *

In the dark, the girl Lilen clutched her knees to her chest and rocked, self-comforting. Black memories, these. Black-slick. A lubricant patina, the oily texture of soot residue between her fingers, a frictionless surface upon which the endless night and its terrors slipped glibly by, bringing dawn's respite.

There had been guilt, at first – for what she had done, and for the joy she had found in the doing of it – but guilt passed. What mattered was that the memory made her feel safe and strong and whole. It kept the flashbacks at bay.

 _Saidar_ was succour, it was safety. It was the roiling dark undertow beneath the semblance of appearance that was expected of her, of normalcy.

She crafted a semblance of form to address the world. Bookish, shy, and demure. Meek and eager to please. There was nothing in her demeanour or appearance to excite disquiet or envy in others. But that wasn't who she was. Under the placid surface a maelstrom of lust, covetousness, pride and wrath seethed. And beneath that, lurking in the depths? Fear and sly hate in equal measure.

Patiently waiting until she was strong enough to seize what she wanted.

What was she, now? A plum plucked out of season, cast upon the ground to fructate, to collapse in upon itself in black decay. She was the peach's pit, poison, all that remained to twist forth a stunted, misshapen life, white-blind roots grasping blindly into soil of nightmare black.

Poison tree, grown from corrupted seed.

Lilen was more, so much more – and so much less – than she had been, before. She knew her darkling heart, and didn't deny it. She was acquisitive, especially of power, malicious as only those who have been themselves preyed upon know how to be. She was a pragmatist – some would say coward and with justification – but that didn't make her a whit less dangerous. A backstabber. A survivor. Let them underestimate her! There was an _absence,_ a blankness she nurtured within that shunned the light and waxed, and writhed as it grew. Like the Strid, she was fathomless. Placid on the surface – but beware the undertow.

It was understanding her nature, accepting it that had finally allowed her to embrace _saidar_ with control. Her power came from surrendering, wholly, to herself, to the worst of herself, and that gave her the power to dominate others. A philosopher might find a different truth in the nature of _saidar_ and surrender, but the woman who had been Lilen didn't much care one way or the other. It was _her_ truth, jealously guarded. In a life spanning the centuries, she had never spoken of the Strid to another. She would not give any other access to the fount of her strength.

Later, as a grown woman, Lilen had chanced the Ways. By then, they had grown dark and foul, a miasma upon them. Necessity had forced her hand, not ignorance. The woman she had become knew the dangers. But even a coward must choose the lesser of two evils in the name of self-preservation, and her need was pressing. She had chosen another name by then, wore it like shield and armour. Her new name, and the fear it evoked, had stiffened her neck with pride.

 _Machin Shin,_ the madness that intincted the Ways had almost claimed her.

 _(Crack the bones/ gulp the marrow. Strip the flesh/ plait the skin/ paint the blood/ peal the screams.)_

A wraith-wind, billowing up out of that sterile dark. A harbinger of yammering horror. Chittering with a repugnant hunger to devour her. Crack open the shell of her mind and gulp down the raw yolk of her sanity, like a starving weasel.

 _(you will bleed/ with me in you/ until I rive/ your flesh in two)_

She heard its voice _within her own mind_ , in her refuge of last resort – a clutching shadow that had somehow slipped between the cracks of her defences. A glottal, unclean, unsane voice, welling up from the safe place within her, brimming with blood like a slaughterhouse's gutters. It was the intimacy of this invasion as much as the animus of _Machin Shin_ which drove Lilen out of her mind with abhorrence. Cast her spirit tumbling into madness.

Keening a scream of denial and outrage, a futile attempt to drown out the voice of _Machin Shin_ , Lilen clasped her hands over her ears, and bolted, witless and wild into the throbbing dark of the Ways. The legion within drowned her piteous cries out, until Lilen could no longer hear her own voice, their evil clamour rising in crescendo like plainsong. Voices that bored into her head with the alien persistence of wood-wasps gnawing into softwood to lay their eggs.

 _(Sing your screams/ scream for me you will/ bleed into me creep/ Into me, spider crawl)_

 _(Beg, mewl, still scream/ Grovel scream bleed/ Breed screams/ Split ribs/ Breed. Bleed)_

The Black Wind followed after. It intended to run her till her heart burst from fear before it claimed her. The anticipation would sweeten the meat.

 _(Marrow sweet/ but meet are screams/ corpse-meat greens/ Fecund flies breed/ Dead eyes gleam)_

 _(You'll do as your/ Father tells you/ Lilen. 'No' is not/ a word we use/ in this house, girl.)_

 _(Lilen lives Lilen/ Loves Lilen live/ In me hungry sweet/ Eat, Lilen, let me/ Eat, bite, hate, Lilen)_

She had been unmanned. Reduced to animal fear and need. Unable to channel, to even seize _saidar_ , her mind scrabbling for control. The Strid had saved her then. Remembering its name, remembering who she was. Remembering the font of her power.

Then even _Machin Shin_ had fled before her anger as she lashed at it with Balefire, the forbidden weave burning the threads of the Pattern itself, eradicating what had been. _Machin Shin_ was not truly sentient, but it _was_ alive. It could be hurt if not killed. Feeling itself lessened, it slunk away.

She was not Lilen. Not anymore.


	5. Chapter 5: Property

**Chapter 5: Property**

The woman huddled against the wall, knees to her chest, head inclined forward so that the matt-dark of her lank hair fell forward, obscuring her face. She was obliged to do so by the dimensions of the wooden box she was entombed in, its walls smoothly-planed hardwood, iron-black, featureless except for the small breathing-holes drilled into the opposite wall.

No, not a woman, though her form and features lent her the semblance of one. She was _da'covale –_ "One Who Is Property" in the High Speech. More exactly, she was _damane._ A Leashed One, though she wore no leash, only a necklace of what appeared to be worked silver, inset with jet. It was the only adornment she was permitted – even her name was denied her – and she was _never_ allowed to take it off.

It was a new thing and an old, the _a'dam_ , creating a link with the woman who wore the matching bracelet. The Leash Holder, Mistress Shanan.

Like much else here, the necklace was more than it seemed. A stranger not from the lands overseen by the Crystal Throne would not have known it for what it was, might not have guessed at its purpose even when the white metal refused to lose its lustre. Even those from the Seanchan heartland might not have divined its purpose without the leash, without the _damane_ to give it context, without seeing the lightning-bolts embroidered into the broad stripes running the length of her dress, an understated cream stitching upon the purest, most virginal white.

Then, if they were wise, they would walk lightly around the one who could hurl fire and call the storm, and rend the earth into a grinding maw beneath your feet.

In repose, the low-ceilinged box was long and broad enough for her to lie upon her side, in relative comfort. It was intended for sleeping, and transportation, and nothing else. The _damane_ had slept in the coffin-like box every night for a dozen years, but the claustrophobia and revulsion she felt towards it remained undiminished. On the outside, it was carved and inlaid with gilt, for the edification of its owner, and not her property. There was not so much as a pillow on the inside for the _damane_ 's comfort.

The top of the sarcophagus was decorated with a stooping raven, a cruel bird with a long neck, talons extended. A fitting allegory for her, as she cowered under the shadow of the spread wings of the mighty Seanchan Empire. Where everybody knew their place.

The _damane_ shifted her bare feet, re-arranging the rough silk of the plain white shift she always wore as she did. Mistress Shanan was a staunch traditionalist. From balmy summer to the snows of winter, the _sul'dam_ required her property to wear only the pellucid shift. The hated clothing of a _da'covale_ offered no protection from the elements, its wearer's naked body casually on display. In an irony that no doubt escaped her dour mistress, the dress sported a high collar and puritanical cut that covered her full breasts and a hemline that almost brushed the floor.

Such a world in 'almost', though. Staining the hem with dirt would merit an automatic strapping, and the _damane_ was glad her shift fitted well and did not drag upon the ground. Shaming it might be, but a _da'covale_ was no more an object of lust than a hunting-dog, a hawk on the wrist. In the stratified world of the Seanchan Empire, even prostitutes inhabited an echelon far, far above the _da'covale_ – they were all free women.

There was an odium in wearing the shift of a _da'covale_ that transcended even that of being shown for sale, naked, at the mounting-block. For at least those about to be sold into servitude were being examined, being _seen_ , albeit for the last time – not as human beings, but like a good breed-sow at auction. Those already indentured were beyond that, just property, featureless, faceless, invisible.

 _Damane_ a step below even that. Because they were feared. Elemental weapons.

The silk was a practical choice, otherwise. The _sul'dam_ believed in the discipline of the lash, beating her property once daily, perfunctorily as a matter of course, with additional punishment meted out for any minor infraction, perceived or real, and the _damane_ knew to her finger's ends that cold water washed out bloodstains and that the spider-silk was tough and durable.

Her hands – scrubbed raw, nails exactly trimmed – felt the dry twist of it, the arthritis etched into her bones. The trick of the One Power she knew to ignore the extremes of heat and cold could not change the physical nature that was wrought upon her by the long winters east of the Aryth Ocean. But for the choice of fabric – thin enough to make _streith_ seem like leather – the centuries-old pattern was as conservative as any goodwife's dress from the Two Rivers.

The _damane'_ s mouth twisted bitterly at the association, as though cold-chapped lips had been treated with salt. _Burn_ the Two Rivers! With a movement of her head both quick and feral, the _damane_ 's glance darted about fretfully, in fear of punishment for the sudden light of anger that had dawned in her eyes. With a shuddering, indrawn breath, she allowed her fear to slowly abate, feeling the flush of terror dissipate in the pit of her stomach like a draught of strong liquor. She was alone in the box. But then, a _damane_ was never truly alone.

One of the more hideous properties of the _a'dam_ was that it allowed the leash-holder to feel the emotions, sense the intentions of the Leashed One. Not to read her thoughts – bless the covenant Darkness for that – though from puberty this _damane_ had practiced to dissemble, to hide her intentions from those around her.

Lately, though, she had passed through a harder school yet, and her tutelage had caused a second metamorphosis. A good _damane_ obeys, instantly and without demurral. It is not permitted to show its emotions. That was the creed Mistress Shanan had inculcated with the strap, with the cane, and for more severe offenses, with the _a'dam_ itself.

By a single thought, Mistress Shanan could inflict any degree of pain, of any duration, of any kind – the sensation of burning was a favourite of hers – through the bracelet. Most conscientious _sul'dam_ sused only the _a'dam_ to inflict corporal punishment on recalcitrant _damane_ – it left no visible marks on the property, and required less effort to administer. Of course, if the pain inflicted through the bracelet was too protracted, too severe, the _damane_ would still die.

Mistress Shanan liked to see the blood flow, to see torn flesh and flayed skin. Seanchan society frowned upon disfiguring one's _da'covale_. Not for humanitarian reasons, no, but simply because it marred the aesthetic of one's property, besides hinting at an unforgivable lack of control. So this _damane_ was spared the worst depredations and mutilations. Or at least the outward physical marks of them.

If her mistress had happened to be wearing the bracelet that partnered the _a'dam,_ and felt the surge of her forbidden, jealously-guarded hatred…. There was no reason why the _sul'dam_ would happen to be wearing it at any given time. But this Mistress Shanan was not as other _sul'dams._ Beneath her prim façade, her _sul'dam_ relished the feel of another's emotions recoiling from her unwanted, soiling touch within the private recesses of mind and soul.

This _damane_ was well-apprised of her own value. She was strong in the One Power, skilled beyond anything these Seanchan required of her – she was worth more than an ocean-going ship and its crew together. She would be an acceptable gift for the Empress Herself. But in her rage, Mistress Shanan might not choose to remember that. This _sul'dam_ might lose control and the _damane_ would die screaming.

Feeling her own thoughts, alone within her mind she knew that Mistress Shanan was not wearing the bracelet. This time. For the time being, she was safe indwelling her native dark, and grateful for it. A spider behind the wall.

The forced intimacy of the link, more debilitating than any rape – that was what this _sul'dam_ enjoyed best. The _damane_ knew that truth for a fact. She knew much, _much_ more than these primitives could ever credit. In an ever-descending continuum of vileness and degradation, wearing the _a'dam_ while Mistress Shanan pawed at her mind with sticky fingers was far from the worst thing this _damane_ could conceive of.

The _cour'souvra_ mindtrap, a suspension of the victim's soul within a latticework of metal wire and crystal, for example. She had been bound by one, once, her very soul a prisoner of another. A game-piece in his hand. She believed her captor dead, at the hands of the Fisher King. Another playing-piece, a blind man, but a perilous one, as it had proved.

Her own mindtrap was intact, and in the possession of Mistress Shanan, who had appropriated it and now wore it amongst her personal jewellery. She had taken a terrible risk in concealing its function from her Mistress. A _cour'souvra_ could be crushed. And if it was, she would look out of the windows of her eyes, unable to control her body, like one comatose. Except her body could and would perform whatever function her Owner, her _Mia'cova_ , required. She would feel, and taste and hear and see, and think, but with no agency, ever again.

A terrible risk, but a calculated one. Because she was an excellent judge of character. Mistress Shanan would enjoy using the _cour'souvra,_ the rich sensation of her squalling, pain-filled thoughts far superior in that regard to anything the _a'dam_ had to offer as she descended irrevocably into madness. The _cour'souvra_ was also a far better applicator for pain, too. Why hurt the body, stimulate the nerve-endings when you could scarify the soul itself?

There was this to consider, as well. The Seanchan considered women who channel to be an abomination, dangerous animals unless forced into compliance by the leash. In practical terms, to the Seanchan, a _damane_ who was simply a tool to be picked up and used would be preferable to one that would murder you if she was ever let off the leash – or a clever one that found a way to circumvent the constraints of the _a'dam_ to harm their _sul'dam_ in some unforeseen way.

The _damane_ smiled a mirthless smile, one with bared teeth. Better to have a _sul'dam_ than a _Mia'cova._ Better being a dog on the leash than a puppet of flesh and blood. A desperate dog that could bite, given opportunity.

The mindtrap was a _ter'angreal_ , but not one that required _saidar_ or _saidin_ – the female and male halves respectively of the One Power – to be used. Touching the device was enough. The hated device had been created using _saidin_ , so there was no danger – she hoped – of the _sul'dam_ accidentally stumbling upon its function. These _sul'dam_ were women who could have learned to channel (but not those 'wilders' born with the spark inside them, as she had been, who would express the ability whether they were taught or not.)

But she was in no danger of her mistress finding a resonance due to the use of _saidar_ around the object... Only of the _sul'dam_ accidentally breaking the crystal. Or touching it in the right way, and feeling her through it… Thankfully, there was an access key to it, touching the vertices of the silver cage in a particular order to 'unlock' it – and her with it. The artisan who had created it had been jealous, unwilling to share his human possessions with anyone. _Burn_ Aginor! Burn his memory to ash for creating this loathsome artefact. But bless him for the safeguard.

The _damane_ raised her head a fraction, uncaring of scraping her short-pared hair against the ceiling. Her eyes were as forbidding as sheet ice, and as calculating. If Mistress Shanan had been there to observe at that moment, she would not have recognised her charge, might have recoiled before her, _a'dam_ or no, at the glacial weight of malice she found there.

No emotion, just the enduring bedrock of a soul that had waited three thousand years for the gestation of the Wheel of Time without losing her sanity, bound to the Wheel as it turned, until the apotheosis where the Pattern itself convulsed, its rotten-slick membrane tearing apart to rebirth the Dragon Reborn, freeing the Forsaken in its afterbirth.

The _damane_ – who was once a girl called Lilen, and who the world better knew as Moghedien, the Spider – licked her lips, angular slash of a mouth curving into the unfamiliar rictus of a smile. For she felt the Pattern _resonate_ somehow, below consciousness, like the jagged edge of a subharmonic torn from the guts of a bowed viol. The shadow of an echo of the convulsion that freed her, the echo of a familiar hated, loved and dreaded voice that had always owned her, that she had never denied. The voice of the Strid. HIS voice.

And across her arctic eyes, a tiny black fleck chased, in punctuation. Almost too fast to follow, darting from one eye to the other.


	6. Chapter 6: Lighter than a Feather

**Chapter 6: Lighter than A Feather**

The wayfarer cast a critical eye over the carefully-constructed pyre of small, dry pieces of kindling. Summer was fading into autumn, and the bleached dead grasses clinging to the arid soil were dry enough for tinder. Poor soil, chalky and alkali, came up with the shallow roots as he tugged a handful of the grasses free. Like much else here, they clung to life lightly. The Pattern was healing, strengthening, knitting together in the years succeeding the Last Battle, but the fabric of what was felt strained here, as if the warp and weft of space and time had been rent in the loom by inexpert hands.

This was Merrilor. A place where unnumbered thousands had fallen in that final confrontation. Where Balefire had been used indiscriminately.

A wind picked up, stirring the long grass of the escarpment where he'd made his camp with the sighing, soughing breath of thousands of voices. Uneasy slept the fallen. So many lives quickened and cut short. The Wheel wove as it would, but the Dark One was untrammelled by its constraints, and many who had died here had died untimely. There were ghosts here.

The traveller had only been to this place once before, a dozen years previously, when the forces of Light planned their final campaign against the Dark One. He had not stood here against the Trollocs and Myrddraals, against the Sharans and the Dreadlords, against Demandred. Duty had called him elsewhere to make his stand while his friends had died for him here. Duty like a mountain on his back.

Once, he would have cut the names into his soul in memorial, each name quickening the anguish, name upon name unnumbered. He had learned release in that final apotheosis. There were ghosts here, but he no longer feared what they had to say. Egwene, Hurin, Bashere, Rhuarc. They stood in the Light and made their own compact with duty. Who was he to deprive them of their _ji,_ their honour? Aviendha had taught him better than that, and at the end, he had remembered her lesson.

He looked at the stack of wood, and a rill of flame abruptly sprang into being, seeping like oil around the twist of dry grass as it caught. _Let there be light._

An anomaly, this. No trick of the One Power, certainly not of the True Power, the dangerously seductive essence of the Dark One. Whatever had happened during the final confrontation and his rebirth had stilled him.

He did not understand how he did this, and none of his Lews Therin memories offered elucidation. Lews Therin had been brilliant, in his narrow-minded way, but no great seeker after knowledge. If anyone still knew, it would be one of the Forsaken, if any had indeed survived the Last Battle. Dimly, the dark man intuited that it must have something to do with his _ta'veren_ nature, his will forcing the Pattern.

He shrugged, dismissing the question. He no longer cared much, that was the truth, even if the implications engendered a vague sense of disquiet. He didn't understand why the Pattern had not moved on, why it still continued to unspool around him like a bobbin on a weaving loom after his purpose was done.

Duty was heavier than a mountain, and he'd done his, borne the weight into madness until it broke him. That the breaking had restored his sanity did not change the fact that he was broken, and remained so. He had reconciled love and care and obligation, become what he'd needed to be – one who mourned for every sparrow that fell, but still able to release everyone and everything he loved. Let all the threads go where they must as the cutting knife fell.

When he sought the Void, he could no longer sense _saidin_ burnished and golden, a molten second sun cresting the horizon. No, he was alone with just the Flame and the Void. Stilling, severing was supposed to be an incurable mortal wound. But he felt no pain, no sense of loss. Maybe he was inured to such things. What was one more trauma?

He looked down at his hands, unfamiliar and strange even after all this time, at this stranger's body he now wore. That body had belonged to a man called Moridin, a vessel imbued with the reincarnated soul of Elan Morin Tedronai, who had become the Forsaken, Ishamael.

Elan was in many ways a kindred spirit, a reflection of the Dragon Reborn in some twisted mirror. Their life-threads had entangled, knotted inextricably in Shadar Logoth, where their Balefire had crossed, but the similarities did not end there. At the end, the two men stood as the mortal personifications of Light and Dark – _sha'rah_ pieces in a Great Game so convoluted that it made _Daes Dae'mar_ look like blind man's bluff.

The Fisher King, blinded and bleeding, had two sides – white and black. A fact that Moridin for all his genius had overlooked in his attempts to manipulate the Dragon Reborn. And of course, they had both passed through insanity in both their previous lives, had led the other by the hand to the other side with honey and gall. Ishamael had restored Lews Therin's mind so he could see Ilyena dead at his hand, whereas the Dragon Reborn had… had what? That memory hung elusive, somehow out of reach. The fruit of a poison tree.

It was a good body, tall and rangy, with well-defined muscle. Ishamael and Moridin had both been aesthetes, ascetics and both had trained with the sword. Long-fingered hands that could have belonged to a painter, or a musician bore the swordsman's calluses. Rand al'Thor – just like Moridin – was a killer. That was a truth, whatever the justification for it. Ishamael had had his reasons for serving the Dark One after all.

Rand al'Thor had not borne a sword since his duel with Moridin at Shayol Ghul. Nor a spear, befitting his Aiel heritage. He had killed too many times – with the One Power, with the sword, with his bare hands, with the word of command, and he doubted he would ever take up a weapon again. He had no time for the Way of the Leaf that his Jenn Aiel ancestors had practiced, though. There were times in which killing was the only answer. But he had not found the need to kill since putting on the body of Moridin.

The man – who had been the Dragon Reborn, perhaps the avatar of the Creator himself, and was now a simple traveller, a wanderer like Jain Farstrider, like Thomdril Merrilin – glanced over at his fire appraisingly, as the carefully stacked construction of twigs and splinters began to collapse inwards upon itself, radiating heat.

He added a few thicker branches now to the kindling, longer dry boughs an inch thick that he would feed into the fire's greedy heart a hand's span at a time, and reached in his pack for the canvas bag containing his wooden flute.

It was a plain thing, hard-worn but true-voiced, not like the gaudy instrument of Thom's he'd once owned with its threaded tuning slide and inlaid silver decoration, just a solid cylinder of ironwood hollowed out at a tuning-lathe with a conical bore.

It had taken Rand a good portion of the dozen or so years since the Last Battle to relearn the instrument. Rand al'Thor and Lews Therin had both played, as had Ishamael before his madness, but Moridin had not the time for such a petty conceit. So he'd had to be patient. Moridin's body did not have the muscle-memory of learning to play, any more than it had the memory of learning the spear, so he'd had to become his own teacher. Now he was competent once more, better than he had been as Rand al'Thor in fact.

Rand set the instrument to his lips, experimentally, and played the first strain of 'The Jolly Tinker', a quick reel, the first tune to come to mind. His fingers were nimble, the phrasing neat. The notes fell dead, lifeless, out of place in that bare place and he ceased, stilled.

One measure, two, and then he put the flute back to his lips again, keening. 'Lament for the Long Night', the held notes shivering, bleeding. The closing dark, appeased, breathed with him, caressing his fire. Lews Therin, Asmodean had known this tune, the great lament for the city of Satelle, betrayed by Sammael who had opened the Gates of Hevan to the Shadow. Asmodean himself had written the song, despite having already gone over to the Shadow at that point. The night a city died.

 _Only the red flame_

 _Dwells within her now._

The fire expired with the final rising, shirring note of the song, leaving a leavening of white cold ash, a guttering of smoke dissipating. Time was strange here.

Rand thought of rekindling it, decided against it. Into the silence he played 'Coming Home from Tarwin's Gap', starkly, simply, keeping strictly to the funereal measure of the march. The song of Manetheren, long dead, of the Two Rivers lads that had fought, bled and died here at Merrilor. It was a song of returning home to hearth and goodwife, but of course, few of those who stood at Tarwin's Gap ever had.

They stood as the sky boiled black with crows and ravens, as the Dark One touched the world. Pent up a roiling sea of Trollocs and Myrddraal in that sheer-sided pass, damming the tide with their bodies while arrows and lightning fell.

They made their stand at Tarwin's Gap to shield Shienar, Kandor, Arafel and Malkier, the Borderlands. They had waited for the White Tower's promised aid, but the Aes Sedai and the _Gaidin_ never came, and so they had faced the Dreadlords without their shield.

Malkier had fallen anyway, despite their valiant effort, their sacrifice, consumed by the Blight. It was only now, after the Last Battle, that the Blight had grudgingly ceded up Malkier, foot by foot retreating, that foully pestilential yet horribly vital deathtrap teeming with perversions of life replaced by a barren wasteland.

Malkier was an frozen desert, a stark earthscape of fissured bedrock and cracked clay, league upon league where nothing grew, and the hard rain beat the ground to no avail, bringing forth nothing, and the summer glazed the stubborn mud like pottery in the kiln. Then when a short autumn fell into winter, why, Borderland winters were cold enough to shatter trees like glass, the sap freezing and expanding.

It was a hard place. It always had been, even before, when things grew there. A hardscrabble hell on the border marches of winter.

Much in the nature of its king, al'Lan Mandragoran, Rand thought with a grim smile, recalling his former mentor. _Tai'shar Malkier._

Pace by stubborn pace, the greenlands were reclaiming Malkier, as fast as windblown seeds could seed its soil, and the scattered Malkieri were returning, a nation once more. Men with the _hadori,_ women wearing the _ki'sain_ , proudly scratching a living from the dirt, spending all their surplus coin on seed grain to cultivate the land.

The Seven Towers were rising, too, their ruins reclaimed and rebuilt, and under the canny oversight of Lan and Nynaeve, Aes Sedai of the Yellow Ajah and Queen of Malkier, by sweat and labour, life was teased, caressed out of the dead ground. There were septs of the Aiel who had no wish to return to the Threefold Land, and Nynaeve allowed many to settle within Malkier's borders, in exchange for them providing their expertise in desert living. They were not farmers, no, not they. Hunters and killers, but they could find the water, track anything that moved and live where nobody else could.

The Aiel that walked Malkier's winter tundra had found a land that honed their edge, that prevented them becoming soft like the wetlanders. A place that killed the unwary as swiftly as the Three-Fold Land. They observed a begrudging respect for the Malkieri and in particular, _Aan'allein_ , their name for Lan. _The Man Alone._

The Aiel recognised strength and honour, even in one who bore a sword, and knew Lan for a warrior without peer, a man whose word was stone and iron and a man whose life was a dagger aimed for Sightblinder's heart. There were even some among them that openly expressed the sentiment that the Horselord should have been born an Aiel. That he would have made a fine clan chief. As for Nynaeve, they loved her unequivocally, as if she was the greatest of Wise Ones. The Aiel gave her a name, too, in the Common Tongue so all men would know it. _She Who Gives Shade_.

With the cultivation and the arrival of people, the awakening of the land, other things were stirring, lured south from the receding Blightborder. The scattered settlements of Malkieri, following the water, were vulnerable to raids.

There were still Trollocs, ones that had fled Shayol Ghul, herding southwards in numbers great enough to give a more established nation than Malkier pause. The Blight had driven them south, culling them hungrily.

Other things came, too, hunting the Trollocs, falling upon the human settlers. Misshapen, tumescent creatures that bore no name and no allegiance. There was worse. _Worms._

Worms were the larval stage of a creature known as a _jumara._ They could outrun anything afoot and hunted in packs. They were also completely fearless, having no natural predators. For some unknown reason, thankfully none of the Blight worms was able to metamorphose into a fully-grown _jumara_ –a hundred-foot long ravening obscenity of tentacles and spines clad in foot-thick chitinous armour.

Adult _jumara_ were solitary and almost indestructible. Another blessing upon creation from the warped mind of the Forsaken, Aginor, who was also responsible for the _gholam,_ a creature that the One Power couldn't hurt. _Jumara_ weren't quite as immune to the One Power as a _gholam,_ but they were reputedly shielded from it in some way.

Rand had been intrigued to hear from a travelling Sharan that the Forsaken, Demandred had barely survived an encounter with such a beast, and had only killed it because he had known exactly what it was and how to slay it.

Worms weren't quite as bad – in the singular. He had nearly seen a Wormpack outside the Eye of the World. Hearing them churning after him, faster than a galloping horse, had been bad enough.

A Worm was thirty feet long and six feet in girth, a blind tube of writhing musculature that tracked by hearing and scent, which could scent a prey over twenty miles and hear a pin drop within ten.

What passed for its mouth was similar to a leech's, if constructed on a gargantuan scale – concentric rings of muscle, inset with ciliae, barbed hooks of chitin ranging from the length of a short-sword to spines a half-inch long – capable of stretching to obscene dimensions to engulf larger prey – a horse, or a bear, say.

And what went into that maw never came out. A single Worm was more than a match for a Myrddraal. A Wormpack could devour a company of trained soldiers, or an Aes Sedai or two.

The Aiel were invaluable. They tracked the horrors pouring out of the Blight. A network of Aiel scouts and Wise Ones that could channel strongly enough to open gateways provided the intelligence. Malkieri cavalry or Aiel warbands would then hit the Trollocs or small groups of assorted Blight hellspawn, eradicating them.

For the Wormpacks, a circle of Wise Ones on overwatch or Green Ajah Aes Sedai could be despatched from the Seven Towers by Gateway in an instant response of overwhelming force. Aiel scouts – Maidens of the Spear, Water Seekers, sometimes True Bloods – could pass almost unseen and silently, but they still took casualties, particularly from the Wormpacks, who could sniff them out.

But even in their dying, the Aiel trackers performed their mission, confirming the presence and location of a Wormpack. If scouts did not report at regular intervals, a circle would be despatched to their location. It was a pragmatically efficient system.

Rand wished that he could have visited Malkier. Helped. Visited Lan and Nynaeve. But that was an impossibility. Though his face was not as well-known as others of the Forsaken, he had no idea whether Nynaeve or Lan had ever met Moridin – things had become so Light-burned _busy_ towards the end of the Last Battle!

Showing up unannounced wearing this face might lead to Nynaeve burning him to a crisp with the One Power – she did have a habit of acting first, and asking questions later. Truth to tell, even if she knew who he was, the same outcome might result.

Rand was supposed to be dead after all. It was quite a piece of conjuring, that, worthy of Thom Merrilyn himself, helped greatly by the ambiguous wording of the Prophecies of the Dragon. He had worked very, very hard to maintain that illusion – the shell-trick he had pulled by swapping bodies with Moridin, in keeping it secret from _everybody._

Only a select few – among them his wives Elayne, Aviendha and Min – might intuit the truth, but Rand had come to understand that he couldn't return to them, either. If he was alive, then the Dragon's Peace that he had forced upon an unwilling, belligerent world would not endure. His blood was the mortar that bound the fragile compact together – Seanchan and Aiel, Tairens and Illianers, Andorans and Two Rivers folk.

Duty, duty. His final duty, heavier than any mountain. To stay dead. And saddest of all, lighter than any feather. His breaking. What he had released, had given up as chaff on the wind – his loves – he could not reassume.

He now knew why he had come here, to Merrilor. To say goodbye. To say goodbye, and to say thankyou. He knew every shade of feeling that a solitary man knows, without the distraction of duty, of friends, of a wife and children. But still despite having accepted it, his heart continued to beat.

 _A feathered thing, that sits within the breast. That plays the tune without the words._ More words from a past life, a memory beyond recall.

The poet had been talking about hope, of course. Unrequited hope. That unbidden, unwanted, cursed feeling, running contrary to everything Rand had painstakingly learned about being alone, by remorseless repetition, increment by increment, hour by hour and day by day.

Rand no longer felt sorrow. Just a spreading numbness, like a man comfortably bleeding to death of a deep wound. He wondered, not for the first time, what Lan would have said about that thought, if he could have framed the words to his old teacher. Would the Warder have seen it as self-pity? Or just another man's truth?

Rand was not suicidal. He'd run those thoughts over in his mind, dulling them with repetition like the blade of a knife over-used. He only felt the long weariness of a thread of the Pattern stretched, slowly unravelling. Of a person cast up, past even duty. There was no need for the Dragon Reborn. So why was he still here? Purposeless, placeless.

Sometimes – and these were the worst moments, bleakness struck through with vital splinters of hope, like veins of silver running through worthless, dangerous rock on the edge of subsidence – he'd entertain the hope that _they_ were the reason the Pattern had not yet excised his thread. Min, Aviendha and Elayne, and the children he had with them. Children he had never met. Surely there was a way he could _force_ the world to his will. He was the Dragon Reborn, the most powerful _ta'veren_ in thousands of years. He had _saved_ the world! Surely he was owed an end to struggle, to happiness after the struggle, the sacrifice, his blood on the rocks of Shayol Ghul?

Even as he framed the thought, he saw its falseness. The world could never accept the Dragon without the threat of the Dark One. It had proved hard enough for them to make a reluctant compact with the Dragon Reborn under the threat of annihilation.

No, if there _was_ a reason the Pattern wanted him to live, he had yet to fathom it. He shook his heavy head. If it wasn't about Aviendha, Min, Elayne, his children, he was indifferent to it, as he was to aught else.

It had grown cold, Rand noted in an absent-minded way. Thankfully, the trick of ignoring heat and cold did not depend on the One Power, and he assumed it without thought. A person could sit unawares as they froze to death, though. He could choose that.

An abstracted part of his mind made the distinction between merely letting himself die and suicide. He did not _have_ to save himself. Let the Pattern save him, if it would. Or perhaps he would rekindle the fire, unpack his blankets and find whatever fitful sleep he could on the field of Merrilor.

What was it that Mat used to say? _Dovie'andi se tovya sagain._ Time to toss the dice. As fine a way to decide as any other.

Rand reached into his purse, a small leather wallet that contained his few personal effects and a few coins of indeterminate value. It wouldn't do for a poor traveller to be carrying gold or silver. It raised too many questions. He didn't have dice, but a coin was sufficient when there were only two possible outcomes to toss for.

Having said that, he had seen Mat toss a coin which landed balanced on its edge. _Ta'veren_ luck. His fingers closed about an object that was no coin. Frowning, he pulled it out to examine, though he knew its nature by feel.

A regular polyhedron of some kind of milky crystal, its pallor deepening to a rose-quartz hue towards its centre, like blood spilled under a sheet of ice. It was enmeshed in a cage of silver wire. This was one of the few objects among Moridin's possessions that he had taken, though it was a filthy thing, recognising it from Lews Therin's memories of the Age of Legends.

The rose-coloured centre seemed to move, swirl – but only when his eye was not upon it. It was faintly warm to the touch. If he listened closely, could he hear a faint threnody of sound too, on the edge of silence? A scream? Disquieting.

Rand knew it for what it was. A _cour'souvra._ The rose-tint at its heart indicated that this one had been activated. A dab of the victim's saliva and blood, and a skein of the unfortunate one's soul was bound to the crystal. Crushing it would turn the victim into a mindless automaton. The merest touch upon it could inflict untold horrors upon the prisoner. It could be used to enforce complete compliance.

To a Forsaken's mind, the _cour'souvra_ was a perfect tool of control, of interpersonal dominion. Rand wondered who it was that was bound to this particular device. Another one of the Forsaken, compelled to call Moridin _Mia'cova,_ perhaps _?_ Or maybe somebody else of power and influence?

Rand could not know. Perhaps some poor unfortunate was afflicted for no other reason than the satiation of Elan's twisted whims. So he kept the _cour'souvra_ , kept it safe from accidental destruction or intentional abuse. Perhaps one day he would find the owned one to return it, or find a way of releasing the captive, though Lews Therin hadn't known of a way….

Pain. Terrible, shooting pain in his head, like an explosion emanating from behind his right eye. The one where the _saa_ hung motionless, arrested in flight, a black-within-black comma in his grey eyes. Moridin's eyes. Sky-lights going off in his head, soundlessly. Vertigo as the world reeled, before coming back into focus like a glass of water when the tabletop it rests upon is knocked into.

Heat in his hand from the _cour'souvra_ , which he found he was gripping tightly, a hair's breadth from the pressure which would have shattered it. Chiming in his ears, which pulsed synchronously with the heat baking from the mindtrap.

Rand forced himself to relax, unknot his hand from the fragile artefact. Shook his head like a boxer trying to clear his head after taking a hard punch. Consulting Lews Therin's memories, this was not a known property of the _cour'souvra_.

In that fleeting moment, Rand caught a glimpse of a face in his mind's eye. Moghedien, wearing a necklace of silver and jet. No leash, but he knew all the same that it was an _a'dam_. He sensed a direction, felt it pull on him like magnetism. _West_. Ebou Dar, the capital of the Seanchan Empire this side of the Aryth Ocean. There was a terrible sense of danger conveyed by the image, over and above that of merely seeing one of the Forsaken.

Then another face succeeded it. One that smashed the breath from his lungs in a whooshing, shuddering gasp, that forced him to his knees.

 _Elayne!_ As beautiful, as vital as she had ever been but it was a woman's face, no longer a girl's, that looked back at him without seeing. Oh, but they had been young, little more than children really when they had played at _Daes Dae'mar_ with the fate of the world hanging in the balance! He had only come to her bed that once. A memory too pristine to bear he'd walled away.

The vision vanished, and Rand al'Thor let out a howl of anguish fitting to the charnel house of Merrilor, to the Lament for the Long Night. A visceral scream, bereft of ruth and sanity.

Rand's eyes prickled with sudden heat. He blinked, but that did not dispel the sensation, so he pulled out his belt-knife, using the worn-polished steel as a makeshift mirror.

"Burn me. The Light burn my bones to ash."

The grunt of a winded man. His flesh crawled with atavistic horror.

For in his eyes, the _saa_ had begun to move once again, scudding across his vision. The sign that a person was communing with the Dark One, was able to access and use the True Power, the essence of _Shai'tan_ himself.

With a lurch of revulsion, Rand reached out for the Void, and – just for a moment there was _something_ there in the emptiness. The suggestion of something vast and primal, a darkness within the darkness.

Rand found himself reaching out, despite himself. He _had_ to know for sure. He heard his mouth, gabbling a childhood prayer, a catechism: _The Dark One and all the Forsaken are imprisoned in Shayol Ghul._

He touched _something,_ the faintest edge of an infinite arc, pulled at something that was hardly there. A thread – if a thread was finer than the smallest subatomic particles, fractally barbed, infinitesimal, infinitely sharp, cutting the mind that pulled it like a bramble in the hand. Then it was gone. Vanished.

 _The Dark One and all the Forsaken are imprisoned in Shayol Ghul._ He knew this mantra was true. _He_ had put the Dark One there!

He had done a far better job than Lews Therin Telamon and the Hundred Companions ever had had in caulking the hole in his prison, tricking the Dark One into pouring his True Power through Callandor to create what Lews Therin had described as an ' _n-sphere in 10 dimensions in the 11-fold of nested dimensions making up reality in this universe._ '

What that meant was what he'd felt when he'd pulled the trap closed like a purse-string – that _Shai'tan_ was perfectly, hermetically sealed within his prison this time, unable to touch the world at all. The net he'd cast wove _saidin, saidar_ and the True Power into a seamless, impenetrable surface – Lews Therin's '10-sphere in 11 dimensions'! That was why the _saa_ had stayed dead in his eyes.

Rand knew, completely and unequivocally – based upon Lews Therin's admittedly incomplete understanding of something he called _compactification of dimensions,_ and a branch of mathematics he called _manifolds,_ whatever _that_ was – that he'd done what he set out to do, sealing the Dark One up inside a box that to all intents and purposes wasn't really part of this _where_ at all.

But he, Rand al'Thor that was, was just a farmer who knew what he knew, and his intuition sufficed as proof for him. The point was that the Dark One was in a black box, and he couldn't know what was going on outside the box any more than anyone in this world could see in – if there was anyone woolheaded enough to _want_ to.

In fact, he knew he had done a far better job than whoever had sealed the Dark One's prison the first time, before those meddling idiots Mierin and Beidomon bored into the Dark One's prison, creating the singularity which allowed the Dark One to directly impact the world.

Whoever wrought the prison the first time – another memory he couldn't access, another Dragon or maybe the Creator Himself – had used only _saidar_ and _saidin._ That construct was seamless, too, but it had an inherent weakness implicit in the nature of its construction.

That first prison had been created from the One Power, and therefore it could be destroyed by the One Power. Beidomon and Lanfear had bored a hole to puncture the membrane – like pushing a needle through layers of tough leather. By contrast, what Rand had made used the essence of the Dark One as well as the One Power. This time, the Dark One and his True Power, his lifeblood, were sealed inside. This time, _nobody_ could free him.

A needle of _saidar_ and _saidin_ would slide along the surface, unable to puncture it – what Lews Therin called 'tangent' or 'asymptotic' to the prison. Only a weave of all three powers used in conjunction could pierce the Dark One's tomb now. An impossibility, with him locked on the inside. Meanwhile this universe would go on with the prison containing the Dark One being a single _'fiber in the fiber bundle making up the 11-fold'_ as Lews Therin would have it. A single black hair in the wool of an otherwise white sheep.

Which made what had just happened impossible. Yet it had happened. For an increment, the Dark One had touched this world once again. Rand al'Thor looked back at the knife-blade, seeing only the eyes of a frightened man looking back at him. The _saa_ had stopped. As if it had never moved. Maybe he _had_ imagined it, after all. He looked again. The _saa_ was fixed in place once more.

In his _left_ eye.

His instinctive reaction, impelled by terror, quelled by reason, was to flee to Caemlyn, to Elayne, as fast as he could. Leave Moghedien to the tender mercies of the Seanchan. But then a terrible thought came to him. He had only been aware of the Dark One touching the world through the agency of the _cour'souvra_. It must be about the mind-trap, somehow. It was only through the _ter'angreal_ that he had seen both women. _First_ the Forsaken, Moghedien. _Second,_ his _mashiara._ His love lost beyond hope.

After the vision, his first, natural thought had been that he bore Elayne's mindtrap. But why then would the device show him Moghedien? A _cour'souvra_ could only snare one victim at a time, so his visions indicated _two_ mind-traps. _Two_ victims, linked together somehow. What if… What if he bore _Moghedien's_ mind-trap, and she bore Elayne's?

There was only one way to know for certain. A terrible one, to be sure. Rand could open the _cour'souvra_ and touch it, accessing the victim. The gentlest of touches, just long enough to distinguish the identity of the person. After all, he had been joined to Elayne using an amended version of the Warder bond, he knew how she _felt._ However, it would still be a painful, violating process for the person thus touched.

His Lews Therin memories told him that it was an evil thing he was contemplating, at least as evil as Compulsion. The thought of doing that to Elayne was beyond bearing. The thought of doing that even to a woman such as Moghedien was revolting, and he recoiled from it. No. He could not, _would_ not do it. Not even with Elayne's life in the balance.

As Rand sat there, a rudimentary, desperate plan began to unfold in his mind. Caemlyn or Ebou Dar? His instincts told him that it was Moghedien who was the threat to Elayne, Moghedien's _cour'souvra_ that he had in his possession. The device had shown him where the Spider was, and not Elayne's location.

If that was the case, Rand wouldn't even have to move from this spot, wouldn't need to torture her. He could simply extinguish her life using the mindtrap. It would be instantaneous and probably painless. Rand had killed a woman before – Semirhage – and the Spider was just as conniving, just as irredeemably evil. He could, would, kill Moghedien if he had to.

Of course, he would have no way of knowing who he'd killed. Elayne or Moghedien? Or possibly even an innocent stranger. His hypothesis was guesswork. He could not act upon it.

 _Use what you have._ If he went to Ebou Dar and not Caemlyn, to Moghedien and not Elayne, he could kill the Forsaken, or preferably capture her (although how he would accomplish the latter without the One Power to shield or still her he didn't know.) He could find the second mind-trap (presuming it actually existed) and assuming that she indeed had it.

With both mindtraps in his posession, he would not need to destroy either. Just deliver them to Caemlyn, to Elayne, where she could hide them away – somewhere they would never see the light of day. _Then_ he could safely kill Moghedien. It was an unpleasant necessity, and he would derive no pleasure from it, but in truth she would be stilled, birched and executed in short order for her crimes by the White Tower among many others, if she fell into their hands. Her life was already forfeit.

Death was lighter than a feather. Especially when it was long overdue.

Rand al'Thor put his knife back in his scabbard, slowly, picked up his flute from his lap and wrapped it back up in its canvas bag before placing it carefully in his pack. He stood, taking stock, a tall, spare figure and shrugged the pack upon his back, using his boot to tamp out the ashes of the fire. He had no horse. All he possessed was in the valise and his pack. He preferred to walk these days, his long strides eating up the miles, and time had been no object. Had not been for a dozen years. Until now.

His horse, Jeade'ean – named for Jain Farstrider's steed which had always seen him home – was dead long-ago, in some long-forgotten battle. Along with the childish dream Rand had once harboured of one day returning to the Two Rivers, a home. Family.

Unwittingly, Rand had known Jain Farstrider briefly, when he'd gone by the name of Noal. A complicated man who'd lived hard and longer than he'd had any right to, and who had died an improbable death at the Tower of Ghenjei. A hero's death.

"If you ever find a Malkieri, you tell him Jain Farstrider died clean!" The wanderer's last words, according to Mat Cauthon. Well, he, Rand al'Thor, he had not died, clean or otherwise, and now he had a purpose once again.

Duty imposed by love. A yoke that was easy, a burden that was light.

Rand concentrated. Found the Void, as his father had taught him. And reached out, neither for _saidin_ nor the True Power, for he would find neither to sustain him. Like the trick of ignoring cold, though, this was something that came easier to one who had used the One Power.

He formed an imprint of the Pattern here, at Merrilor, and threw out his will, searching for somewhere in all the wheres that could be, all the possibilities, for somewhere else that matched it. What he was doing was analogous in some ways to using a Portal Stone, in other ways similar to making a Gateway, but it was neither. Both were now impossible for him.

He closed his eyes, waiting until his mind felt a tugging sensation, like a fish gaffed on a hook, and opened them. He was still in Merrilor, but this time he was in _Tel'aran'rhiod_ , the World Between the Worlds, the Dream Within a Dream.

Rand had discovered this trick by accident, a few years back, unwittingly dreaming himself into _Tel'aran'rhiod._ He'd spent an anxious few days fumbling his way back out again before he starved to death – you could make food simply by wishing in _Tel'aran'rhiod_ but it would not sustain you – trying to work out how he'd done it.

He'd tried to use this new-found ability to travel from place to place – either by travelling from place A to its equivalent in _Tel'aran'rhiod_ and then to destination B or its equivalent in the Dream, trying all the permutations of routes into and out of the dream to try to get to a new place. But he was firmly locked into accessing the place he was in, its equivalent in _Tel'aran'rhiod_ (and for all he knew, the same location in other parallel worlds, such as the world he had accessed via Portal Stone, travelling through with 'Selene', chasing Padan Fain.)

He couldn't Travel, just use the existing properties of _Tel'aran'rhiod._ That didn't matter much, if at all – it was almost a semantic distinction, since it was possible to change locations within _Tel'aran'rhiod_ just by imagining it – in fact, for an inexperienced Dreamwalker, it could happen inadvertently.

Then, from there, he could egress _Tel'aran'rhiod_ into the real-world equivalent of the new place. Somehow, the difference was reassuring. A relief. He was neither a channeller nor the Creator. Matter of fact, he'd been incurious about the extent of his new abilities, this enhanced _ta'veren_ nature. Now, he had the uneasy feeling he was going to have to learn fast. Much might depend upon it.

A disquieting thought, to add to all the others – how would he know that he had arrived back in his own world instead of one of the other alternate realities? He could distinguish his world from _Tel'aran'rhiod_ easily enough – it had different properties for a start. A man could soar like a starling there if he so desired.

But what about when he tried to return to the 'real' world? True, if those worlds were like the one he'd walked through – a wasteland where the Trollocs had defeated Artur Hawkwing, and picked their teeth with what remained of humanity – he'd know.

But what if he arrived in a world that was similar to his own? Rand had an inkling that in all the other worlds, the Dark One had already won, and his was the only hold-out where the Dark One had been defeated. He pictured the other worlds as trouser-legs belonging to the same set of pants. Every new leg created by a different decision, however infinitesimal….

Rand shook his head, baffled by the intangibles. Despite Lews Therin's Age of Legends memories, such metaphysics were beyond him. He had a suspicion that Lews Therin might have had a better education in the sciences, but no greater innate capacity for comprehension than he.

The thought of ending up in a different world had been disturbing enough that Rand hadn't used the trick again until now. Bad enough to be apart from Aviendha, Elayne and Min in this world. To be trapped in a world where they had never existed, or had passed on, was a thought beyond bearing.

Even if there was a Min, an Elayne or an Aviendha in such a world, they wouldn't be the women he had known and loved. He knew this, because in his battle with the Dark One he'd created worlds – or at least the possibilities of worlds – and seen their natures changed. Spoiled, marred by the difference. So he hadn't used the trick again. Until now, there had been no need. Now there was.

Rand thought about Ebou Dar. Visualised himself there, in the courtyard of the palace where he'd confronted the Empress Tuon. Made himself weightless, like a bird soaring hundreds of feet up into the air until he had his bearings, the city laid out like a quilt below him.

That left him as vulnerable as a swordsman in Heron Wading in the Rushes, though. There was probably nobody here to see this incongruous sight, there being few Dreamwalkers in these times, and most of them trustworthy Aiel Wise Ones. Wolves, who had proved their loyalty to the Light.

No sense in taking chances though, so Rand quickly made himself invisible. A neat trick if he said so himself, bending the light about his body. _Tel'aran'rhiod_ had its own rules, just like good, homely Two Rivers reality, but often there was a way of circumventing them, if a Dreamwalker had imagination. _Tel'aran'rhiod_ was malleable, pliable.

He wished this trick was one of his own devising. It wasn't, not really. There was even a weave he had known as Lews Therin that achieved the same in the real world. Mirror of Mists.

Rand picked a place below that looked secluded, an easy ramble from Ebou Dar's main gates – a green clearing within a dense coppice of pine – so that nobody would see a man appear from nowhere. Glided there in _Tel'aran'rhiod._ He sat down, folding his legs on the springy grass – lush here, still green and fragrant – and began learning the place, just as he had in former times preparatory to making a Gateway.

He concentrated, felt the familiar tug on his consciousness and awoke in Ebou Dar, but not unobserved. A doe rabbit, sitting upright on her hind legs, washing her face with her forepaws jolted into anxious, scurrying flight as Rand al'Thor abruptly appeared before her kissing-close, almost nose-to-nose, her white tail bobbing as she zigged and zagged. Rand laughed, watching her go, and cracked his knuckles, pushing himself to his feet. It felt _good_ to be needed.

Had it been a crow or a raven, Rand would have killed it on sight, though. An old Borderland tradition, that, maintained with good reason, since the Dark One or his Forsaken could use the carrion birds for eyes. Spies and battlefield scouts that had cost many a brave man his life. He did not require the One Power for that, nor even a good Two Rivers longbow, not anymore.

What was it he had once said when he threatened Cadsuane? "Do you believe that I could kill you? Right here, right now, without using a sword or the Power? Do you believe that if I simply willed it, the Pattern would bend around me and stop your heart? By . . . coincidence?"

Death was lighter than a feather, and Rand carried it lightly.


	7. Chapter 7: The Wheel Weaves

**Chapter 7: The Wheel Weaves**

As Rand al'Thor would later have cause to reflect, and no doubt as Maitrim Cauthon would have told him for free with a sardonic smile and a shake of his head, _ta'veren_ luck is a knife sharpened at the hilt. Regarding luck and _ta'veren_ , for all his jokes Mat might have been the wiser of the pair, treating both with the caution of a dog that has already bitten once and might do so again.

 _The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills._ A proverb that means different things depending upon who speaks it, on their perspective, their intellect and intuition. Proverbs are food only in the mouth of the wise.

In the Two Rivers, it was something a man might say with a shrug to explain a loss at cards, the death of a good ploughhorse (once he had unburdened himself of all the cusswords his fertile mind could think of).

An Aes Sedai might give the same cant to a labourer toiling under an unjust lord, a statement about theology from an atheist powerbroker, expecting the man to sigh, and bow his head, and resign himself to his station in life.

For her part, his teacher Moraine Damodred had believed that the Wheel was neither good nor evil in nature. A nuanced argument from a great academic. His friend Perrin, a blacksmith, had rejected that notion outright from the very beginning, refusing to believe that the Wheel indiscriminately mixed pot metal with the true steel.

As far as Rand knew, he, the Dragon Reborn, was the only person who had ever heard the spoken voice of the Creator, on the slopes of Shayol Ghul. Because of that, he now gave more credence to Perrin's argument than Moraine's. Whatever threads the Wheel wove, the Creator's hand was upon the Wheel, and the Age Lace was somehow the greater and nobler design despite the dark threads woven into it. Complex good arising from simple evil.

The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. The Creator's hand is upon it, and we say thankya, and as long as we hold true it weaves for good.

But whose good? _Ta'veren_ luck is part of the Pattern, and a strong _ta'veren_ with a stout heart – especially a Dragon Reborn – can bring the Good, the righting of the Wheel of Time where it totters upon its axis. The Blight recedes. The desert blooms.

But even a strong _ta'veren_ – _especially_ a strong _ta'veren –_ becomes susceptible to the insidious belief that the Wheel works to _his_ good, say true, and it may be so for a time, even years, and _that_ is _ta'veren_ luck, too. Luck compounding luck.

Mat was wiser than Rand. For all Rand's sorrows he had not learned the truth, not then. Luck was a horse to ride like any other. What's left unsaid is there's a time to get off the horse, before you are thrown.

Here's where tragedy meets comedy. What does that greater Good look like, measured in the span of hundreds of years, an Age? Is a time of hard-won peace and relative prosperity Good, if it ushers in an era of complacency, where Pride, Envy, Greed, Lust, Gluttony and Sloth hold sway – and the cardinal virtue of Courage is forgotten?

Or is a dark thread in the Pattern – the metastasis of an evil – sometimes more desirable in the long run? For example, a terrible, senseless war – bringing with it Wrath and Cruelty – (but nurturing valour, steadfastness and self-sacrifice), followed by a future built upon Prudence, Selflessness and Justice?

What does that Good look like for the hopes and aspirations of a single good man, who finds himself at the eye of the maelstrom? The Light preserve those whom he loves, who are drawn into his life. May the Creator shelter and protect them in the hollow of His hand.

Rand had learned another thing in the confrontation with the Dark One. The Creator had chosen to allow his creations complete freedom of self-determination. Free will was a terrifying thing, for all that individuals prized it above all else. If they chose, they could wreck not just the Age Lace but the Pattern itself, and the very Wheel. It had happened in other worlds.

Despite that, the Creator was prepared to put the decision in the hands of His creations, and stand by the outcome. Only if they acted in concert, if significant numbers pulled together, were prepared to fight and lay down their lives for what they knew was good and true, would the Creator continue to guide.

He laid out a plan, from the foundations up like a man building a house, through the Prophecies and through the innate knowledge of Good and Evil He planted in every heart. And then He.. abdicated?

No. Never that. He was like a good small-town mayor, who would only oversee whilst He was elected. Whilst He had the mandate. He was the King Rand had instinctively tried – and failed – to be while he stitched together his coalition to face the Dark One.

In the end, Rand had learned that you could only govern by consent. That it was better for the whole world to fall and fail and _Shai'tan_ to win than to prevail using the tools of the Enemy.

The Aiel knew this, better than anyone. They were his people, and he loved them, but he saw them clearly. They could be cruel, particularly to outsiders. They lived in a near-continual state of warfare between the clans. He understood, better than most, what a broken, tortured compromise of identity _ji'e'toh_ was to those who had been the Da'shain Aiel. How so many of them had cast aside their spears because of it.

Rand wept for them. The truth he had brought had stripped a comforting, noble lie from them, leaving many bereft of _everything_ , every shred of aspiration beyond mere animal survival. He hoped beyond hope they could find their way to some better place than the desolation he'd made for them. They were his _mashaira,_ too.

Those who had remained were neither stronger, nor weaker, just those more capable of compromise, of adaptation. From them, he had learned that _ji'e'toh_ was noble because it aspired to something greater. Justice. Integrity. Provision for widows and orphans who were not even of their race. They did not lie. They did not steal. Even the Aiel way of battle placed the highest honour upon touching an armed opponent without harming them. It strove towards the Light, even towards peace.

When the Last Battle had come, he had seen the Aiel refuse to abandon the least strictures of _ji'e'toh_. _Gai'shain_ who had not served their allotted time in white would not fight. It was anathema to wetlanders, insanity!

Rand smiled. In the end, he had even accomplished what Aviendha had suggested, half in jest – to take the Dark One _gai'shain._ When he'd tried to tell her the Last Battle was not the place for such scruples, for considering what brought the most honour, the shade of his heart had flared up in anger. "A warrior must always consider _ji'e'toh_." she had rebuked with heat. "Have I taught you nothing?" How beautiful she was when roused, all seriousness, truth, purity of intent.

 _Ji'e'toh_ was not the Way of the Leaf. He had come to see that in many ways it was superior. The Way of the Leaf was purely pacifistic, but in some ways it was a selfish belief too. A man should hate to kill, should only be prepared to do so as a last resort, but he should be prepared to do so to protect an innocent life. To choose to die instead was unconscionable. Dishonourable. It was putting your own 'spiritual' good above somebody else's welfare.

A soul got bent, broken, battered, tarnished. It was a tool, like a bill-hook. Something that could be used for peace and war alike. A man did some honest labour with it, and then tried to fettle it when life gave him a moment. Let the Creator judge him afterward.

Another truth, one never acknowledged. Rand al'Thor, bore no love for his Creator. Awe, yes, fear of Him always – the beginning of wisdom. For his plan, for his provision, gratitude. But not love. He would try to stand in the Light, because it was _right_ to do so, it was _proper_. For him, righteousness and protecting the people he claimed were one and the same thing, and somehow, throughout all the wrack of battle, the two things had never been placed in direct opposition.

It was a distinction that the Dragon Reborn, for all his intelligence was blind to, and for whatever reason, all the wiles of the Dark One and the Forsaken had never been able to put him in a place where he was faced with the stark dilemma: Serve the Dark One, or see this loved one die, right here, right now, in front of him. Maybe the Forsaken, the Dark One were simply unable to comprehend the magnitude of love's claim, didn't understand what a powerful motivation it was, even for the Dragon Reborn.

* * *

It had begun to rain precipitously. The downpour deadened sound but enhanced the other senses. The air was redolent with the musky scent of pine sap, and his steps brushed over a carpet of pine needles, displaced the bracken gently, his soft deerskin boots pacing carefully.

Any Two Rivers man worth his salt knew the rudiments of woodcraft and tracking. Rand al'Thor had been better than most, retained enough of those skills within the dark husk that was Moridin's body to leave little trace, only a spoor that the rain would wash indelible. He left little trace upon the terrain, in contrast with the mark it left upon him, his clothes picking up moisture from the fauna he travelled through, until his garb was soaked.

Upon leaving the copse, he struck out for the high road. Under the open sky, the rain lashed down in sheets, wicking from the scant protection of the slouching hat he wore. He moved quickly now. A traveller upon the road would be less remarkable than a man crossing the open fields for any that cared to look.

The high road was a fine causeway now, Seanchan work – stone flags laid firmly upon a bed of gravel for drainage, a canted highway wide enough for two wagons to pass. There was no traffic upon it as dawn broke chill, grey bleeding into black under the unremitting cloud. His feet marked time until he reached the watching walls of white stone. There was a raven banner hanging from a crosstrees above the open Moldaine Gate, rain and breeze twisting it into a sodden wrap of featureless cloth beneath the bird's staring head.

Responding to the incipient threat it represented, he unconsciously found his Warder-trained body falling into Cat Crosses the Courtyard, a walking form that radiated a deadly, relaxed grace, and forced himself to slouch instead, to shield his body from the rain. Just another weary traveller seeking respite from the rain and breakfast.

A bleary-eyed guard in a tabard marked with a white chevron wearily waved him through, the man clearly wanting nothing more than to return to the glowing brazier filled with sea coal to warm his hands. A local recruit, the chevron indicating an irregular of dubious quality compared to the battle-tested Seanchan troops of the line, which Rand knew were redoubtable. There would be keener eyes and sterner tests ahead.

Within the walled city, the buildings rose up, three or four stories high. The Ebou Dari had grown prosperous under the Seanchan, their city a nexus for trade between the Westland nations, and Seandar across the Aryth Ocean.

A whole city block adjacent to the Tarasin Palace and abutting the Mol Hara central plaza had been cleared altogether, razed, to make way for a Travelling Ground, where secure gateways connected Ebou Dar instantaneously with the principal cities of the Raven Empire across the ocean. Seandar, Kirendad and Noren M'Shar. And of course to Imfaral, dominated by the prison-fortress of the Towers of Midnight, lances of jet-black Power-wrought stone scraping the sky.

With careful practicality, the Seanchan husbanded the knowledge of their heartlands that Luthair Paendrag Mondwin had claimed. It was forbidden for non-citizens to use the gateways to Seanchan, so no unleashed _marath'damane,_ still less the abhorred _Tsorov'ande Doon_ that he'd once been – Dark-Souled Tempests. Men who could channel – could ever find their way across the ocean.

The Last Battle had radically changed the ways of war. Gateways could instantaneously connect any two places, allowing armies, channellers and the materiel of war to arrive where it was least expected. The only caveat was that the channeller making the gateway needed to know their destination, and even then, it took them time to 'learn' a place by being there. Now that knowledge was power, jealously guarded.

An intended consequence arising from this – a sweetener for their continued loyalty to the Raven Empire – was that it allowed the Ebou Dari to effectively monopolise the trade of a continent, enabling them to undercut even the Sea Folk, which made them fabulously wealthy, almost incorruptible. That was the reason why Ebou Dar was the Eastern capital of the Empire, the joint seat with Seandar of the Crystal Throne.

Ebou Dar wore its concubine's opulence brashly. There were many new buildings, some of traditional white limestone but carved in the heavily-handsome, stylized Seanchan way. Others were fronted with white marble, or boasted thick-waisted columns of green jet or ebony – unattainably expensive here, but evidently more commonplace in Seanchan.

An early-rising Ebou Dari girl sashayed past Rand, her traditional marriage-knife worn around her neck at odds with the swooping silks that adorned her, clinging to her bountiful curves. A style that hinted at the dress of a lady of the Blood, without overtly imitating it. The Seanchan were very exacting about such matters.

She flashed the handsome dark-haired stranger a frankly-appraising smile, together with a suggestion of an alluring sway in her hips, that somehow reminded him of Min. Min, who could have achieved the same effect in her breeches. She was here too, surely. A thought that had not occurred to Rand until that point.

His distraction was such that Rand wasn't aware of the man sheltering under the carved wood of a porch across the street, tapping out his pipe against the rail to knock the ashes out into the road as he surveyed the street and the downpour, even the fetching girl with a world-weary air before retreating inside with a sigh. A whip-lean old man, all sinew and gristle.

If he had, Rand might have noticed the gaffer's gaze linger upon him just a fraction too long, a fraction less disinterested than he appeared. Seen the man cover an involuntary start, cheeks blanching. But lost deep in reverie, he did not even notice the man was there at all.

* * *

The man Jephath was one of those known informally amongst themselves as Mat's Magpies. Many of their number were former members of the Band, since the Band was a polyglot group of men from the Westland nations. Most of them were either former Redarms, or scouts with _Shen en Calhar_ – law-enforcers or law-breakers by inclination. Astute men, in either case.

Officially, these men had been honourably pensioned-off to enjoy a tidy retirement in Ebou Dar. Unofficially, they were the eyes-and-ears of Mat Cauthon, now Prince of the Ravens, husband of the Empress.

The Empire had its own secret police already, the Truthseekers, and a dangerous crowd, but Mat Cauthon just plain felt safer having a few of his ex-soldiers watching his back and why not? He was a trusting lad, too trusting for his own good – or so he'd been once, and so he'd have you believe he was yet. And the Seanchan played at assassination as if it were a sport. He'd made it plain as a pikestaff that it wasn't a game he wanted to play, but even his _friends_ amongst the Seanchan would try it on – and jest about it afterwards if he'd had a close call.

Strictly speaking, it was a capital crime for a Prince of the Ravens to have his own private army. Happily, the Seanchan couldn't move for tangling themselves up in layer upon layer of bureaucracy and functionaries. The Magpies didn't exist on paper, they did not advertise their presence. They did not commit assassinations or other overt acts, so they didn't exist, left no trace. They merely watched and reported – mouth to ear. They were drawn from a cadre of men whose loyalty had been proved beyond question over twenty years, and they were canny men – ex-poachers, horse thieves, black-market racketeers who'd survived a decade of war in the Band. Men who could get things done. Men who missed nothing. If the Empress knew of it, she turned a blind eye.

Oh, and the Magpies had another duty, seldom talked about. There was a list of faces that they were required to memorise, that had been sketched by Mat Cauthon himself, drawing upon his Age of Legends memories, and the eyewitness accounts of people who had met them.

It was this task that had set Japheth's face to the pallor of chalk and caused his hands to shake. The faces they were required to memorise comprised the thirteen Forsaken, as they had originally looked, plus any new faces they were known to have worn when reincarnated. Though it was widely believed that none of the Forsaken had survived the Last Battle, Mat had been sceptical. "They are like bloody cockroaches. Show me a body. In fact, burn me, unless they've been killed by Balefire, I won't believe they'll sodding well _stay_ dead! Even if they are, another Forsaken might wear that face. I won't take chances."

There was a call-box in the main room – a relic of the Age of Legends, a _ter'angreal_ that did not require channelling. Japheth cursed as his unsteady hand fumbled, almost dropping the porcelain receiver as he activated the standing flows by the press of a button, and placed his mouth to the microphone. A call he had hoped he'd never have to make.

He swallowed, trying to work moisture into his throat as the call-box chimed and Vanin's nonchalant, drawling voice greeted him, indolent with good living. "Well? What is it, Japheth?"

"You need to get Lord Mat to activate a _damane_ group." Japheth managed, gasping as though he'd run a mile. " _He's_ here. Just passed my burning _house._ Headed into town, in the direction of the Palace and the Travelling Grounds. Protocol Chosen."

There was an alertness in Vanin's voice now. Stern but calm, as if calming a shaken raw recruit. Mother's milk in a cup, but Japheth was grateful for the reassurance! "I need a name before I can authorise. Give me a name, Japheth."

" _Him._ Ishamael. He's wearing Moridin's face. For the love of the Light, send _everybody._ Everybody you have."

"Burn me" Vanin swore softly. Fear thickened his voice. "Burn me black and crispy."


	8. Chapter 8: Grasping For the Dark

**Chapter 8: Grasping for the Dark**

Moghedien had – perhaps unsurprisingly – responded with greater alacrity to the Great Lord's touch than Rand al'Thor. She hadn't needed a mirror to observe the _saa_ dance across her eyes, to feel the pull of the True Power within her. To her it felt like the creaking of half-rotten boards over a disused mineshaft, looked like the interference pattern of light forced through the cracks.

With an eagerness impelled by desperation she'd grasped for it, scrabbling into the gaps between the material to the immaterium beneath, prying with the fingernails of her mind. It hurt, like splinters being forced under her fingernails, but she didn't care. Wasn't mindful of the tear of blood that was welling up from the lachrymal duct of her left eye, expressing itself upon her cheek. She could feel His presence slipping away, the breach in reality healing. _No!_

With a final, galvanic effort, the Spider snatched at something, feeling it writhe within her grasp like a living thing, before she secured it. It thrashed like the tentacle of a box jellyfish as it sensed both matter and a human soul. Matter the Creator had made that the Dark One longed to destroy. A soul the Creator had quickened that _Shai'tan_ yearned to corrupt, subjugate or annihilate.

Acting on instinct, she had tied off the filament of the True Power before her conscious mind had recognised it for what it was.

The thread of Fire she had secured was orders of magnitude finer than any thread of _saidar_ she could handle. _Saidar_ was slick, almost frictionless where the True Power was not. The Dark One's essence was granular down to the quantum level. The thread quivered with a malign energy. Wanting to cut, rend and tear.

She had fashioned a Moëbius band perhaps a half inch across, with a singular flat surface she could grasp and a single, infinitely sharp edge. It was the finest razor in all the world, so sharp that in a sense it was not even fully present, a slice through reality with Hausdorff dimension somewhere between 2 and 3.

The Moëbius configuration was simply the most stable knotted configuration for a single tied-off thread – a tied-off weave of the Power usually organically dissipated over time, although some weaves, such as the traps set around _Callandor_ in the Stone of Tear, would persist forever unless triggered. The Spider knew that her weave would only endure for a matter of moments. It would have to be enough.

Now the Spider laboured frantically, in a thirsty agony of fear and hope. Sweat slicked her body, making the clammy _damane_ shift cling to her, itching, stung her eyes, prickled her scalp as Moghedien concentrated as she never had before. The _a'dam_ which held her captive was almost perfect as a tool of dominion. The woman who wore the collar could neither touch her own collar nor the controlling bracelet, whether or not the _sul'dam_ was wearing it at the time. So she could never free herself by unclasping the leash. Nor could a _damane_ release herself using the One Power – the leash prevented her channelling, even from holding _saidar_ , without permission.

The True Power was an exception to this rule. Wearing the _a'dam_ could not constrain the use of the Dark One's essence. And the True Power could destroy anything the One Power could create – even _cuendillar._ The tiny sliver of True Power Moghedien was wielding was insufficiently rigid to pop the clasp of the slave collar, but that didn't matter, given sufficient time. Working blind, she was fraying away the bracelet, sawing away at it using the razor of Fire.

It was fraught, difficult work. The blade sought her flesh, sought to twist in her grasp and the silk shift was soon bespattered with blood welling from a myriad of almost imperceptible cuts that refused to numb – the razor seeking the nerve endings below the dermis.

Twice now Moghedien had almost lost the weave, crying with pain and frustration as she felt the inevitable, the fragile thread beginning to lose integrity, fading even as it began to untwist itself and fall apart. She'd found that allowing the blade to cut her slowed the dissipation process, nourishing the abhorrent thing, so she'd let it feed on her as she continued to cut apart the _a'dam_ at a link where the silver of the collar was at its narrowest.

Strange sensations enveloped the Spider as the _a'dam_ began to lose its integrity, and she gritted her teeth, clamping down upon her terror. Broken _ter'angreal_ were unpredictable and dangerous beyond belief. Were her situation not so desperate, she would not have dared attempt such a course. No sane woman would.

The razor ran smoothly in the groove she'd cut into the soft silver, and Moghedien reached out to where the floor of her cell adjoined the wall, to where her _tool_ was concealed _._

Another property of the leash was that a _damane_ cannot hold a weapon. If she perceived an object to be one, she could not utilise it for any purpose whatsoever until she had expunged the violent thought from her mind.

Painstakingly, over the months, the Spider had found a place where the wood of her coffin had cracked and pried free a narrow jagged splinter the length of her hand. The doing of it had gashed her nails, occasioning further punishment, and the _damane_ had patiently endured the beatings, the abuse to make her _tool_.

Her tool was _useful._ It had _many practical utilities._ That was what the Spider had told herself. Moghedien had practiced, trained assiduously to find a level of pacifism that would allow her to use it. She would have made a perfect Jenn Aiel, a follower of the Way of the Leaf. Sword. Spear. Arrow. Even a shocklance. Just _tools for hunting._ Not that she would ever get near those! But who knew what opportunities might present themselves to a patient _damane_? Meanwhile, she had gouged the crude knife from the unyielding hardwood. Waiting for some opportunity beyond hope.

Turning the knife over in her hands as she worked at the _a'dam_ with the razor of the True Power calmed her, helped her focus, reduced the upwelling of panic. It was a poor thing, a pitiful statement of defiance. Yet it was a rejection of her captivity, however small. Holding it comforted her.

There wasn't enough time. Moghedien could see the weave of Fire becoming foggy, ghostly. Transparent, like the shift of a _da'covale_. Then suddenly it wasn't there anymore, except for an afterimage in her retinas which she blinked to dispel. Her hand clasped the wooden splinter in her fist, careless that the rough wood drew blood, a matchstick spelk of wood breaking off under her skin. Damaged or not, her _a'dam_ was still around her neck, collaring her. Could she dare to hope it no longer prevented her seizing the One Power?

Hopefully, hopelessly, Moghedien reached out in the Void towards the stagnant sun that was _saidar_ , and found it denied her as she knew it would be, the light she tried to grasp breaking apart like a reflection in water as she reached towards it. The Spider let out a keening cry of hope denied. She was still a Leashed One.

There would be worse to come. When she had felt the Dark One's touch, it had registered as if it came through the _cour'souvra_. It was not a sensation she was likely to mistake for anything else. But her mindtrap hung around the scrawny neck of Mistress Shanan, day and night. That loathsome reptile must have felt something when the _ter'angreal_ was activated. Known that her _damane_ had lied to her about the purpose of the object.

Surely, the _sul'dam_ must now know that the _cour'souvra_ was an artefact of the One Power – a _ter'angreal_ or _angreal_ – and the Spider knew only too well that Mistress Shanan would put her to the question, using the _a'dam,_ until she had discovered what its function was.

Moghedien might be able to hold out a few hours, motivated by the knowledge of what the mindtrap could do to her in Mistress Shanan's hands, but she would tell her in the end. Would _beg_ to tell her. There was a craven part of her that wanted to confess right now, to throw herself upon her Mistress's mercy, that had begun to feel that this was the _right_ thing to do. And it was at that moment that Moghedien realised, for the first time, the truth she'd been hiding from herself. The _sul'dam_ had broken her. She was thirteen-year-old Lilen again. Victimized. Vulnerable. Powerless.

No. _No._ She was _Moghedien._ One of the Chosen. One of the most feared tyrants in history! She had been the stuff of nightmares for a thousand years, a story told by parents to terrify their children into obedience: _Be good, or Moghedien will sneak into your room and take you._ Mistress Shanan with her incipient taste for cruelty was like an adolescent bully compared to the refined sadism of a Semirhage, even a Mesaana. The _sul'dam_ was as a freshwater pike compared to the deepwater shark she had been.

The only trait of Mistress Shanan that gave her pause was the reckless insanity of her unrestrained wrath. A Chosen with that trait wouldn't last long, no indeed, but it made her a very perilous Mistress. A capricious deity to be appeased. But after eighteen years of abuse, Moghedien harboured a very un-Forsaken-like desire to have her vengeance whatever the cost. If the _sul'dam_ came for her, she'd _kill_ the bitch, with her pathetic little bit of wood or with her fingernails. She'd bite her throat out with her teeth!

Her eyes widened as the implication of her thought dawned upon her. She looked down at her right hand, still grasping her improvised weapon in her blood-slick fist.

As soon as she had thought of harming the _sul'dam_ with the dagger, her hand should have cramped in agony, and she should not have been able to go near the dagger for days, even if her Mistress commanded her – which she would, to reinforce the lesson of the punishment. The Great Lord only knew what the thought of clawing out Mistress Shanan's eyes with her fingernails, of biting out her throat would have cost her. Likely Moghedien would have had to be fed through a straw!

The _a'dam_ might yet prevent her channelling, and the Spider could not see any way to remove it, but it no longer prevented her from using a weapon. No, indeed! It was a jest worthy of Be'lal.

She could have her revenge.

She could escape whatever imaginative punishment the Seanchan could devise for a _damane_ who slew her mistress.

As long as she was brave enough to use the knife on herself. She, the coward Chosen.

Or she could do what she had always done. Find a way to survive.

Moghedien heard her voice, a rusty caw, cracked with disuse and thirst, reeling with a laughter she could not suppress. She clasped her knees and rocked as she howled with mirth, but her good right hand retained its vise-like grip about the wooden splinter.


	9. Chapter 9: Honourless

**Chapter 9: Honourless**

Uthair recalled the only time his father had ever struck him.

A hard blow with his open palm. Artless, angry, not the controlled strikes of the martial arts Uthair studied. He'd watched the blow advertised, the instant where he could choose his options – block, slip the blow, even an incapacitating nerve-strike to his father's elbow with his stiffened fingers – and instead, chose to let the blow land. There was blood in his mouth, coppery and bitter. Grimacing, he spat a string of bloody saliva upon the tamped dirt of the floor.

He raised his eyes to Mat's, unguarded anguish in his that matched the fury in his father's.

An hour after the battle of Nadin's Gap, gateways opened and his father's army had arrived. They'd finished supressing the rebellion in the South, and had disposed of Fairhand and Eadain's forces. Now their _damane_ were Healing his most badly-wounded men, opening a Travelling Ground so his exhausted troops could step straight through to well-earned rest and recuperation in opulent Seandar, instead of enduring a weary half-day march up the winding mountain road to the plateau where the great city dominated the plain.

By the vagaries of chance, his father's forces had opened their first Gateways on the scorched heath where the refugees had been annihilated, a half-mile to the South. Seen the charred bodies, twisted and shrivelled. Smelled the sickly roast-pig stench of burned men, women and children.

Handoin was dead. His own followers had suffocated him with a cloak, so that royal blood was not shed in the process. A far kinder fate than the law decreed. Had he been taken alive, the High Lord would have been sewn up inside a bag of black silk and hung from the lofty Towers of Midnight, suspended from a gibbet, there to gyre in the salty West wind from the Aryth Ocean until thirst drew the life from his body. The Bloody Boar's remaining forces were scattered to the winds, surrendering or slain. The war was over. But Uthair thought that for him the war would never end. It would be with him always.

Father and son faced each other across the big square tent that was Mat's command post in the Nadin Gap.

"You killed them. _All of them._ "

It wasn't factually accurate – there had been survivors of the massacre – but Uthair didn't bother to contradict his father.

"You couldn't be arsed to check a scouting report. Or perhaps you simply didn't care. Tell me, what do your Seanchan tutors consider acceptable 'collateral damage'? Have you been there? Smelled the cooked bodies?"

Uthair's icy reserve disintegrated, immolated by his fury. "I was trying to keep my men alive! We've been fighting for our lives, outnumbered ten to one for three months. Starving. I haven't slept in three days, I've been on half rations with my men for weeks. Yes, I made a mistake. Maybe the great Maitrim Cauthon, the Son of Battles would have done better – but you _weren't bloody here_! No, you let your sixteen-year old son fight Handoin for you, and now you swan in here to take the credit. After I beat the piss out of the bastard for you!"

"You want to know why you are here with an army at your back?" Mat snarled back. "Because you bloody wanted it! All you've ever craved is to fight and kill. You've become your own man, and let me tell you something: It's men like you, and men like Handoin that make this world the hell that it is. I spent my whole life trying to avoid being put in a position where I'd have to take life, but you... you bloody _revel_ in it. Well? Have you had your fill of it yet, boy? Are you sated? I'll tell you this. You're no son of mine!"

"And don't I know it?" Uthair shot back. "The only person who has ever given a damn about me is Tylee, and now she's _dead_. Which is the consequence of my actions. Along with two thousand innocent people, and eight hundred and sixty-three of my men today. Which is also on me. So pour it on! All your contempt is nothing to me beside that. Your anger is a fire I could piss out. I care nothing for you or my icy bitch of a mother. You are loyal to nobody and nothing except your own skin and that coldhearted black swan. You can both _burn_ for all I care!"

Uthair's pain had coalesced at that moment into an epiphany that the father he'd been trying to emulate was not worthy of his regard. All that was excellent, worthy, admirable – duty, honour, the martial virtues – his father had eschewed, choosing at every turn the easier road of comfort, ease and license. All that had redeemed Maitrim Cauthon was the force of the entire Pattern – _aven'kal_ and his _ta'veren_ calling – forcing him into a place where his martial talent could be unleashed upon the servants of the Dark.

If further proof of his vacillating character was required, his relationship with the Empress revealed the truth. The personal values Mat claimed to care so much about, all suborned to her worship. Mat claimed to wish _damane_ to be free, but he did not raise so much as his voice on the subject, despite the fact that Maitrim's own _sister,_ Bodewhin Cauthon was not just _marath'damane_ but Aes Sedai to boot.

If his father had possessed a shred of integrity, he would leave Seanchan, but Mat Cauthon would not, and that had nothing to do with _ta'veren_ and everything to do with _her_! If that was what love was, Uthair wanted none of it. Love was a rot, a cancer upon duty. He would be different. Truer.

He would be Seanchan.

* * *

Uthair sat alone in his chambers. Upon his lap was one of the items that had been taken from the possessions of the Forsaken, Semirhage, who had ruined Seanchan and in the guise of Tuon's Truthspeaker had come within a hair's breadth of slaying the Reborn Dragon. The Forsaken had possessed a stasis-box laden with many things – most of them dangerous mysteries that had burned out the _damane_ who had attempted to study them and scarred the minds of their _sul'dam_. This object was not one of their ilk. This was something else entirely. A cat of a different coat.

Knowledge of its very existence had been suppressed. It was not on any of the lists itemising the artefacts of the Age of Legends that the stasis-box contained. It had been hidden in a locked box, buried in a dark vault. It would have been destroyed had such a thing been possible, but no craft of men nor force of the One Power was able to mar this object once created.

It was a slick-dark cube of what felt like polished metal, blacker than his dreams of Nadin's Gap. It spoke to him, and he strove with it. A voice of power and authority. A part of him recognised who it was he spoke with, a thought never articulated. He tried not to think of what that voice represented. Only of the words it spoke, and the power they promised him.

He remembered the augury of the albatross. A double omen. In and of itself, the albatross presaged victory, dominion. The greatest of good omens. Yet a bird indoors was a terrible portent, foretelling some dark doom laid upon him. The two were one and the same for him. He shivered. It was then the Darkbox spoke to him.

YOU NEED FURTHER ENCOURAGEMENT TO FIRM YOUR PURPOSE, UTHAIR PAENDRAG OF THE LINE OF THE HAWK? YOUR MOTHER THE EMPRESS IS _MARATH'DAMANE,_ THOUGH HER ABILITIES ARE NEGLIGABLE _._ SHE IS AS WEAK IN THE ONE POWER AS SHE IS IN HER RIGHTEOUSNESS. SHE IS NOT FIT TO RULE, ONLY TO WEAR THE COLLAR.

Uthair started, swore. "I suspected it."

SHE KNOWS IT. AND SO DOES MAITRIM CAUTHON AND THE TRUTHSPEAKER, ELMINDREDA FARSHAW. IT IS THE DARKEST OF SECRETS – ONE THEY HAVE KEPT FROM YOU. WHAT IS MORE, EVERY _SUL'DAM_ IS ABLE TO LEARN TO CHANNEL. NOT JUST FORTUONA. THIS IS THE LEVER THAT WILL SHIFT THE EARTH UPON ITS FOUNDATIONS. NOBODY WILL CONTEST YOUR RIGHT TO RULE ONCE YOU SHOW THE WORLD THE EMPRESS WITH THE _A'DAM_ AROUND HER NECK.

Uthair slowly released a pent up breath he hadn't realised he was holding.

BRING THE _SUL'DAM_ CORVIENE AND HER _DAMANE_ LIANDRIN IN HERE. COREVIENE IS LOYAL TO YOUR COMMAND AND LIANDRIN IS OF ME. BID COREVIENE TO RELEASE LIANDRIN FROM HER _A'DAM_. WE NEED HER. AS A _SUL'DAM_ THAT CAN CHANNEL, SHE GIVES YOU A WEAPON NONE WILL ANTICIPATE.

HIDING AMONGST YOUR _DAMANE_ IS ONE OF MY CHOSEN, MOGHEDIEN. LIANDRIN CAN FIND HER FOR US. BID LIANDRIN BRING THE DARKBOX TO HER. WITH MOGHEDIEN'S COUNSEL AND STRENGTH, NONE WILL BE ABLE TO STAND AGAINST YOU WHEN YOU MOVE TO TAKE THE THRONE.

HER KNOWLEDGE OF THE FORBIDDEN WEAVE OF BALEFIRE WILL GIVE YOU THE EDGE YOU NEED TO CONTEST THE MIGHT OF THE WHITE TOWER AND THE BLACK. IT IS YOUR DESTINY TO COMPLETE THE _CORENNE._ TO SUBDUE THE POWERS AND PRINCIPALITIES UNTIL THE RAVEN SPREADS ITS WINGS OVER THE GLOBE.

Uthair's brow furrowed with suspicion. "Why not send the _sul'dam_ to find Moghedien? Why the need to free a _damane_?"

BECAUSE SHE IS NOT ONE WHOSE SOUL IS IN MY KEEPING. IF SHE TOUCHES THE DARKBOX, SHE WILL SENSE ME, FEEL MY PRESENCE, EVEN IF I DO NOT CHOOSE TO SPEAK TO HER. THAT IS THE DARKBOX'S FUNCTION, AND EVEN I CANNOT PREVENT IT. DO YOU WISH TO TRUST THAT HER LOYALTY TO YOU SUPERSEDES HER AFFILIATION WITH THE LIGHT? WILL SHE CLEAVE TO YOU THEN – OR BETRAY YOU, UTHAIR PAENDRAG?

I SEE YOU DO NOT TRUST MY WORDS ALONE. JUDGE INSTEAD MY ACTIONS. I HAVE ALWAYS TOLD YOU THE TRUTH. I AM _CAISEN HOB._ LIGHTEATER. I REWARD THOSE WHO SERVE ME WELL. I PUNISH THOSE WHO FAIL ME. I DESTROY THOSE WHO OPPOSE ME.

HAVE I NOT SERVED YOU? I AM THE ONLY TRUTH THIS WORLD HAS EVER NEEDED – WITHOUT RUTH AND WITH TRANSPARENCY. LIGHT AND DARK CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT EACH OTHER. THEY ARE COËVAL. INDIVISIBLE IN THE HUMAN HEART.

THE LIGHT INTENDS YOU TO BE A DRONE IN THE HIVE, UNTIL YOU AGE, FAT WITH SLOTH. YOUR EYES DIMMED SO YOU CANNOT EVEN SEE THE PITY AND CONTEMPT IN THE EYES OF ALL WHO LOOK UPON YOU. YOU CANNOT ADVANCE OR FULFIL YOUR POTENTIAL. THE ACCIDENT OF YOUR GENDER PROHIBITS YOU FROM TAKING A HIGHER RANK THAN YOU HAVE ALREADY EARNED, THAT OF BANNER-GENERAL. YOU CANNOT EVEN MARRY AMONGST THE HIGH BLOOD, SO THAT NEITHER YOU NOR ANY OF YOUR LINE WILL EVER CHALLENGE FOR THE CRYSTAL THRONE.

YOU HAVE GIVEN FAITHFUL SERVICE TO YOUR EMPRESS, THE WOMAN THAT BORE YOU. HAS SHE EVER SHOWN YOU ANY SIGN OF AFFECTION? SHE GAVE YOU A SWORD OF STEEL BUT NEVER SO MUCH AS A KIND WORD.

YOUR FATHER DANGLED YOU AS BAIT FOR HIS ENEMIES, AND INSTEAD OF HONOURING YOU WHEN AGAINST ALL ODDS YOU PREVAILED, HE SHAMED YOU FOR YOUR ONE MISTAKE. ONE THAT GRIEVED YOU SORELY AND THAT HAUNTS YOUR DREAMS TO THIS DAY.

THE LIGHT HAS ABANDONED YOU. YOU CAN ACCEPT IT LIKE A COWARD – OR FORGE YOUR OWN DESTINY LIKE A MAN.

I OFFER YOU TWO CHOICES. A TRUE PROPHECY. OBSCURITY WITH IGNOMINY, OR THE GREATEST DESTINY OF ANY OF YOUR LINE SINCE ARTUR HAWKWING. LIGHT OR DARK. CHOOSE WISELY.

* * *

Min Farshaw was seated cross-legged upon a great grey boulder. The wind-weathered stone lay exactly at the centre of the _kara-seain_ rock-garden, the coarse surface of the rock bearing the grain the dry desert wind had etched into its surface. She frowned in mild irritation at the incessant pounding of the rain upon the retractable sloped roof of transparent glass above the courtyard.

This was Min's favourite place in Seandar, perhaps because it was the most alien, the most distinct from her roots in the small mining town of Baerlon in Andor. Limb by limb, she had been shorn of her past, home, then friends, then family, and finally then her love. Why then should she cleave to a treacherous past that had rid itself of her, shook her off like mud from a traveller's cloak?

She raised a delicate cup to her lips, its sides so thin that it was almost translucent, seeming to glow with its own inner light. The unglazed white porcelain was Sea Folk work, all the way from the island of Tremalking.

The _kaf_ she sipped was bitter, laced with cardamom and honey, the coffee beans milled into a rough-grained powder precipitate which rasped irritatingly, delightfully against the tongue. The piping-hot _kaf_ warming in her belly, even as she gathered her shawl about her.

Today, she was not dressed in the hated green silk of a Doomseer, her hair all scraped up and set with metal and precious stones. The clothing that set her apart as an agent of Fate, honoured and feared but alone. Who wanted to be near someone who could see the Pattern weave the wyrd of their life? Instead she wore good Two Rivers wool and her hair hung free about her face.

She'd spent ages with a comb trying to reverse the damage done to her hair by the ridiculous hairstyle she'd been obligated to wear. Of course, her hair _still_ bristled like wire despite her best efforts. Tuon had ruined it, as she ruined everything she touched, sweeping her up as a useful possession and crudely moulding her into a purpose. The acquisitive little mink!

With an effort, she pushed the angry thought away. If this was to be her last day on Earth, she wasn't going to spend it thinking about the Empress.

Min had seen her last Foretelling this morning, and knew what it portended. A stylized icon, like the tattoos the Sharans wore, a complicated interwoven pictogram. Today was the day of her death.

She hadn't told anyone. Her only friend here was Mat, and she figured that he'd only fret and vainly attempt to prevent it from happening. But even a _ta'veren_ couldn't prevent the things she saw in her visions coming to pass. And failure to save her would scar his soul. He and Rand were very alike in that regard. Woolheads, the pair of them! She grinned. Did all men keep their brains in their backsides?

Min was still angry at Rand for running out on her. That wasn't fair of her, she knew, but she didn't care. Saddened that she hadn't kindled with child like Aviendha and Elayne. She missed their presence in her mind, too. It had vanished with Rand's passing.

She felt a jolt of envy for the other two. _Saidar_ kept them young and fair, while she'd aged. Her hair was greying, and she dyed it with indigo. Ridiculous self-pity she quashed. She'd had a _good_ life. A life that had mattered. She'd had a chance to use her gifts to make things better, and by and large she'd done well, she thought. Hoped.

Idly Min wondered what it would have been like to have Rand's children – an ever-present reminder. Would that be easier, or harder?

Something dreadful was upon them all. She saw it on everything today. At first she thought it was only her imagination – after all it wasn't every day the Pattern told you your number was up. A shadow hanging over everything like the cloths folk draped over the furniture at a wake. It wasn't really there, she knew. And yet it was.

The last thing she'd done before coming out here was to despatch Mat and Tuon a messenger, telling them something terrible was about to happen. Wonderfully unspecific. It piqued her professional pride. Her last Viewing, and it didn't tell her anything important!

* * *

Wei Dan's bare feet were soundless, sure on the bare stone. He picked a careful path, avoiding the gravel and small stones that might betray his presence, avoiding brushing up against the twisted, gnarled form of the curious little trees these Seanchan favoured. There had been none like these in his inhospitable homeland, Co'dansin, east of the scalding, impassable sands of the Termool which partitioned Shara from the Aiel Waste. Only waxen, spiny cacti, swollen fat with their harvest of life-giving water.

There was a loop of wire held loosely between his hands, the hardwood handles of the garrotte wrapped with linen cloth for a more secure grip. It took a surprising amount of effort to strangulate a person.

The Sharan was long-boned and sallow of face, tilted almond eyes that had seen much and remained sere framing hollowed cheeks. His matt-black hair, shorn in front, was gathered long behind in a braided _cue_. The mark of a sworn man, enabling the neck to be readily bared for the headsman's axe if he displeased his oathlord. His breast bare to embrace the honourable blade that waited at life's end for a man of his chosen profession, marked with the Penitent, a tall glyph from navel to throat, whorls of jet. A killer's brand, seared into flesh and spirit with the One Power. _Embrace shame._

 _Embrace death._ His own, and those of his prey. Both, inevitable.

The assassin was vastly experienced, his prey old and feeble. Yet there was a tightness in his eyes that betrayed his nervousness, his hair lank with sweat. He had been extensively briefed about his target, knew her fondness for knives. That did not concern him. Compared to him, she was unskilled. Defenceless.

It was not the woman Min Farshaw which worried him. It was the Doomseer, Darbinda. _Was_ it possible to surprise one such as she? He did not know her weirding ways. And that concerned him.

He was within twenty paces, the noise of his progress muffled by the hammering of the monsoon rain when the Doomseer swivelled round on her bottom as pertly as a young girl to regard him without surprise. A buxom woman of middle years, clad snugly in men's clothes of wool, a shawl around her neck. There was a cup of _kaf_ in her hand, which he noted as a possible weapon.

She regarded him quizzically, noting the incongruous weapon in his hands with a complete lack of surprise. Instead it was she that surprised him with a rueful chuckle.

"So _you're_ how it happens." Min said, lightly, even though her stomach felt full of butterflies. "I should have known. Now I'm kicking myself that I didn't pass the detail of my impending death and the pretty little tattoo picture on to Fortuona. I bet she would have puzzled it out. Not just a pretty face, our Empress! I guess that means Uthair sent you, seeing as you spend all that time training with him." _Poor Mat. What did he do to deserve a son like that?_

Wei Dan nodded. "I have nothing personal against you, Doomseer."

"Well, it feels bloody personal to me." Min retorted. "Light, man, what causes someone to do what you do for a living? No, don't bother telling me. I don't much care." She sighed. "Look, can you at least give me a minute to finish my _kaf?_ It's a bloody good cup and it'd be criminal to waste it. Not as criminal as murdering someone, but it's right up there."

The Sharan nodded as if it was all expected, his demeanour that of a highly-trained waiter at the dining table. "Of course, Doomseer. Pray do not tarry."

Min shook her head, taking a sip of the coffee. It was sweet now, the cup nearly empty, the last of the _kaf_ sloshing over the sediment of honey and grounds. The best part. And the worst. "I hate it when people call me that, or Darbinda. My name is _Min_. Min Farshaw. If we know each other well enough for you to want to kill me, you should at least use my given name. Anything I can do for you? Want to know your future, Wei Dan?"

For the first time, she saw she'd unsettled him. A petty victory, but it still felt good. He shook his head quickly. "No, thank you, Min Farshaw."

"Probably just as well" Min allowed, taking another gulp of her coffee. "I'd have only made something up to spite you." She looked into her cup a moment, then drained it, letting the honey trickle down her throat. "All gone." With care, she set the delicate porcelain down on the surface. "Just make it clean."

The assassin nodded. "You are a brave woman, Min Farshaw. I could wish we met under better circumstances." Briskly, he doubled the loop of the garrotte, tucking it back into his belt. "I can give you a dignified passing. You may want to close your eyes."

Min took a last grateful look around before her eyes closed. Wei Dan walked up to her where she sat, placing the first two fingers of his right hand to her neck gently, locating her carotid artery. Incrementally, he increased the pressure, his stiffened fingers pressing harder.

After a few moments had elapsed, Min began to sag, falling backwards. Almost solicitously, the assassin caught her with his left arm, all the while maintaining the pressure. Her lips moved, murmuring. "Rand." Then she stilled.

Wei Dan laid her slowly down, keeping the pressure applied to her throat for a couple of minutes to be certain. Then he closed her eyes, placed her hands together upon her breast and stood, sparing his target a regretful glance.

Wei Dan felt, rather than heard the presence of somebody behind him and whirled, hands in a high guard. It was the Aiel, Muradin, who stood some twenty paces back. His _shoufa_ was up, covering his face, and there were spears in his hands.

"Stand off from me, Aiel" Wei Dan warned, his left leg sweeping out across the ground as he settled into a deep-rooted fighting stance. "I did this on the command of our master. It had to be done. She is a scout in this battle. As an Aiel, you should see the necessity of it. Blind the enemy's eyes."

"I know why you did it" Muradin replied evenly. "It was not honourable. She was no warrior. Would you kill a blacksmith, a child? You are beyond _ji._ And I acknowledge no master. I had an association of honour with the man, Uthair Paendrag, which his actions today have ended. Now you will both die. First you, and then him. _Honourless_."

The Aiel leapt, casting the spear in his right hand at Wei Dan who moved like a _gara_ lizard, skittering away over the stones. The Sharan ducked behind an outcropping of sandy stone, disappearing. Muradin listened for the sound of his footfalls. Nothing. He bent, picking up a pebble, tossed it just to the right of where his opponent had vanished, imitating a footstep, and prepared to cast his spear the instant the man showed his face. No movement. Muradin grinned humourlessly. The man wasn't to be drawn.

It was dark down here beneath the profligate torrents of water coursing from the sky. Claustrophobic. The stoneyard was a place of shadows, an alien landscape, illuminated only by the darkling sky above. Yet the dance of spears was ever the same.

A flicker of movement behind one of those tree-sculptures was the only warning Muradin got, a hard-thrown knife zipping at his head as he threw himself flat, rolling away from where the Sharan saw him fall. On elbows and knees, he wriggled forward to cover. Behind a round boulder, he allowed himself to stand.

The Sharan came vaulting over the top, taking him by surprise, the choking wire in his hands outstretched as he leapt. Muradin threw a hasty spear at him and missed, leaving him only the one in his left hand.

Wei Dan landed on top of him, and Muradin twisted, struggling for ascendancy, managing to spill the Sharan off him. Both men rose to their feet, circling. Hiding was done.

The assassin flicked the weighted end of the garrotte at his eyes. Muradin parried with the spear haft, but as the Sharan had intended, the wire wrapped itself round the spear, and then Wei Dan tugged on it like a wetlander landing a carp, pulling him off balance.

The Aiel relinquished his fouled spear and struck out with his clenched fist instead, but the Sharan slipped it, trying to lasso his neck with the garrotte's other end. Muradin got his arm in the way, the steel wire biting into his forearm, but he endured the pain to drag the Sharan in close, headbutting him.

Wei Dan let the garrotte go, instead striking with his extended fingers for his clavicle, digging in like the talons of a hawk. The pain was awful, a blue-black threnody that threatened to incapacitate him. But it could be endured. Muradin lashed out with a bearpaw strike, breaking the Sharan's nose, driving the shards of bone into his brain.

Muradin looked down at the _da'tsang,_ making sure he was dead. It was time to leave.

He had work to do.


	10. Chapter 10: Prince of the Ravens

**Chapter 10: Prince of Ravens**

Knotai – First Rodholder and General of the Ever-Victorious Army, Raven Prince by the grace of the Light – was a heron-tall man, ebon hair tinged by the first flakes of grey, his lanky frame sprawled across a tall lacquered chair, giving the appearance of entitled indolence, even arrogance.

One booted foot was propped up by a small trestle table upon which rested the well-gnawed remnants of a pheasant and an abandoned Stones board, the Black pieces apparently landlocking an unassailably large volume of territory where the White player had writhed and twisted like a _jumara_ in its death throes _,_ trying to prevent his forces being swallowed up.

The Raven Prince gestured, and a male _so'jhin_ diffidently removed the carcass of the plundered game-bird, the braids of his half-shorn head nodding as he bowed deeply. The servant raised an eyebrow, indicating the Stones board. With a scowl, Maitrim Cauthon shook his head. "Leave that be."

It had been a dance of choreographed violence, the game, as all true battles were. With the conflict entering its inevitable conclusion, his opponent had coyly perched upon his knee, affording him a tantalising feel of her well-turned rump, leaned her ebon face against his as if darting in to steal a kiss .. and breathed in his ear. "To be continued .. I will leave you to savour my victory and consider your final moves. I fear business of State requires my attention."

Then she'd adroitly dodged under his familiarly-enfolding arm, and stolen away like a breeze of cinnamon and myrrh, drawing her dignity about her as she went.

His wife, Tuon. Better known as Fortuona Athaem Devi Paendrag, Empress of the Seanchan Empire by the grace of the Light. His concubinage to the most powerful woman in the world was a joke befitting the Dark One himself, and it had been a rare pleasure to vent his feelings upon the creatures who'd forced the bargain upon him, the thrawn-minded Aelfinn and Eelfinn. Though the doing of it had cost the life of a good man that the world had best known as Jain Farstrider.

 _Thus is our treaty written; thus is agreement made._

Balefully, he glowered down at the Stones board with his one good eye. That _storming_ woman! Now he knew he'd have no peace until the game was concluded and he was left with his inevitable defeat. Was he truly the man who had bested Demandred, with the fate of the World in the balance?

Mat laughed at the hubris of the thought. Tuon was truly formidable and completely ruthless. A worthy adversary, and here, he had no _ta'veren_ luck to sway the balance. But all the same… He clicked his tongue between his teeth. What kind of a world was it where his wife could tease him so, without even allowing him the recourse of pinching that inviolable royal rear in retaliation?

He had almost been minded to try it anyway – except for the ever-present oversight of two hulking Ogier gardeners. A far cry from genial Loial with his pipe and his books, these were humourless, utterly rigid and belligerent warriors, alert for any perceived slight upon their Empress, even from the Prince of Ravens. It wouldn't have ended well.

Mat looked down upon the stones board, surveying the rout of his White forces. It had been thus at Merrilor, but there, he'd managed to find a way to turn it around. Surely, there must be some way he could recoup his losses and make her sulk like a child, just for once. He snapped his fingers. "Bring me my pipe, and a pouch of some good Two Rivers tabac." He wasn't done yet.

His gaze fell on the long spear that he had gained on his journey through the twisted _ter'angreal._ The blade of the _ashanderai_ had been Power-wrought, and would never need sharpening, nor break. It bore the ravens that marked him true, that laid out his fate before ever he had met Tuon, before the cresting wave of _aven'kal,_ the surge of the Pattern, had caught him up and dragged him inexorably towards his destiny. As an arrogant youth, he'd thought he'd mastered the quarterstaff, had thrashed two apprentice Warders – swordmasters-to-be and princes of Andor to boot – in the training yard of the White Tower.

For most of his youth, Mat had fought to deny the memories of a thousand warlike lives of a soldier-general of Manetheren, but he'd needed those memories in the crucible that shaped him, as he had responded to those trials with courage, instinct and most of all good old-fashioned luck. It had taken him a dozen years to fully assimilate the combined wealth of knowledge and skill of these shadow-lives, to integrate it into his being.

Acceptance had come with the simple realisation he _was_ those men, when you allowed for the culture and background they – he – had grown up in. Now he _was_ the spear, when he needed to be. It was those other lives – most particularly the battles he'd fought, bled and far too often died in – that had furnished him his greatest talent, as the pre-eminent general of the Age. Many of those men had been talented at Stones or _sha'rah_. None had been the equal of Tuon, however. More was the pity.

He looked out over the Mol Hara square, where he was supposed to be overseeing the drilling of a crack regiment of men of the Deathwatch Guards. Light, with all the distractions incumbent upon him, he had no chance really of defeating his wife at Stones. The dark-garbed warriors in their green and red lacquered armour – a viscid red as dark as drying blood – moved with an eerie precision, their movements uniformly precise, inhuman under their insectile helmets crowned with stalk-like mandibles. They drilled with the implacable awfulness of a colony of ants. Ready to kill or die without question.

Mat let them get on with it without his interference, though he'd witnessed a thousand years of conflict first hand. It was a mark of his respect.

The armour and weaponry was his one improvement, his only suggestion to augment the deadliness of the Seanchan elite fighting force. Under the lacquer and polish, the armour was not iron or steel of the first water, though it had been, once. Flows of the One Power, woven by _damane_ had transformed the metal into _cuendillar._ It could not be broken, bent or even scratched by any weapon, any force, it was irresistible to any extreme of heat and cold and inert under weaves of the Power once it was set. It was light to bear, too, compared with good steel or even wood. Only the essence of the Dark One himself could degrade _cuendillar._

The hafts of those green-tasselled spears, too, were _cuendillar,_ left unpainted, the bare surface of the heartstone spear-shafts an unnatural bone-white. The blades themselves were Power-aligned steel, like his. For some reason, the process that created _cuendillar_ left slightly rounded edges on worked metal, though in all other respects the process left the transformed object a perfect facsimile of what it had been before. Mat supposed there was a moral in that somewhere.

Ah, there was his pipe. His flint and steel. He sighed with pleasure as the nicotine calmed his mind and he wreathed the uncomplaining _so'jhin_ with a smoke-ring, slightly twisted like that damned _ter'angreal_ which had been the author of his troubles. The girl coughed, supressing it with an effort.

Funny, that. He'd been sure that he'd sent the male attendant on the errand. That was the trouble with living amongst the Seanchan. You started to think like them, to look upon _da'covale_ as property. Objects to move around like Stones pieces. He apologised to the young woman, awkwardly. Too much practice ordering people around. Of course, to a Seanchan, being a _so'jhin,_ an indentured servant to the High Blood was a great honour. Mad the lot of them. Mad as Cenn Buie with a ferret down his trousers.

The _so'jhin_ actually frowned at his apology, which meant he had probably insulted her or brought ignominy on his station as Raven Prince or some such. No doubt he would hear all about it from Tuon in stultifying detail this evening, once she had finished euthanizing his Stones forces. A perfect end to a Light-burned day.

He raised his palm towards the drilling Deathwatch Guards, and they fell in. They did it perfectly, of course, forming an exact double line, spears held at attention. Their captain stepped a pace forward and bowed. What was the man's name? He couldn't recall. "An excellent demonstration, Captain. Your diligence is a credit to Empire and Crystal Throne." That sounded sufficiently formal. If a bit pompous.

Of course, it was almost Tuon's name-day. Being Empress, she had two – her coronation date and the date she had received her adult name. This was the latter. He'd wished to provide her with a surprise present to mark the occasion. But it had proven trickier than he'd thought to furnish a present fitting to the occasion without violating one of the numerous Seanchan superstitions, not to mention the many precepts of acceptable behaviour amongst the Blood – even with the resources of the Empire to draw upon. But he thought he had finally hit upon something a little different.

Mat crooked his finger to where a robed _sul'dam_ stood beside her leashed _damane_ , who knelt with demurely bowed head, hands folded in her lap. Beside them waited two tall men, with an air of watchful readiness about them. Warders. The _sul'dam_ and _damane,_ flanked by the Warders, approached. The human Deathwatch Guards did not move so much as a muscle, but somehow the air was charged with tension, the potential for sudden violence. Not because of the Leashed One. A collared _damane_ , even a Tower-trained former Aes Sedai, was just a tool.

It was the two men that occupied the Deathwatch Guard's attention. Mat heard the grinding sound of the Ogier Gardener's armoured fist on his right as he gripped his axe haft just a little tighter. He held up his palm and the _sul'dam, damane_ and the two Warders stopped and bowed, facing him. The _Gaidin_ briefly met his gaze with appraising eyes, a flat, professional gaze that could mask any emotion. The Aes Sedai – a Saldean with a hooked beak of a nose and eyes like awls – wrenched her head upwards as if in denial that she'd been forced to bend her neck. In her eyes was stark hatred. Murder.

 _Delightful,_ Mat thought to himself. _Yet another Aes Sedai who wants me dead._ Unconsciously, he touched the foxhead medallion hung round his neck. A reassuring gesture that wasn't based upon superstition. The foxhead medallion was a _ter'angreal_ which in Mat's humble opinion gave a man the greatest gift the One Power could afford. When wearing it, flows of the One Power directed at him would melt harmlessly away. _I am no Aes Sedai meat._

The Gardener to Mat's left gave him a quizzical look, and he realised that he'd spoken his thoughts aloud, and in the Old Tongue. _Inde muaghde Aes Sedai misain ye_. "If this one offends you, Raven Prince, I can despatch it for you." The Ogier rumbled his gravelly response in the same tongue, as quietly as an Ogier could, which sounded like a rock slide a few miles away. This Gardener – Hartha – was in his prime, a little over three hundred years old, and he, like all his kin, were fluent in the Old Tongue, which was their native language – befitting a race of historians and scholars.

The Ogier, and their Stedding, were guaranteed immunity in return for the service of the Gardeners. In some ways it was a better covenant than anything they enjoyed this side of the Aryth Ocean. In Seanchan, not a single stedding had been destroyed. And the Ogier had preserved their scholarly, sedentary, somewhat bucolic way of life.

But as with all things Seanchan, the price paid was steep. Ogier selected for the Deathwatch Guard left their people, never to return, swearing a mighty oath of fealty to the Crystal Throne. The Empire would not suffer divided loyalties among those who served it.

Mat grimaced and shook his head. "Sa souvraya niende misayn ye, alantin" he pronounced apologetically. _I am lost in my own mind, Treebrother._

These three – the Green and her two Warders – had been among those foolhardy enough to break the terms of the handfasting between the former Amyrlin Egwene al'Vere and the Empress, a compact more formally ratified by the new Amyrlin, Cadsuane Melaidhrin. Unless part of an embassy, no woman of the White Tower was free to travel in Seanchan-held lands. Aes Sedai in breach of this law could be taken as _damane._ Unfortunately, far too many Aes Sedai, particularly Greens, seemed to think they could flout Seanchan law and travel where they would. These had learned differently.

He turned his attention back upon the quartet in front of him. The Warder on the left was clad in a distinctive scale armour made up of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small silver coins. The brynie afforded protection to the wearer's torso and upper thighs, but lacked a chainmail hood.

The face above the mail, beneath that close-cropped black hair was a familiar one, one to fill the veins with ice. It was a soldier's face, impassive and bluff, that would have been handsome without an almost indefinable quality of hardness that was its dominant quality. That ascetic countenance, all planes and angles, the granite jaw and knife-like blade of his nose could only belong to one man. The Forsaken, Demandred.

Mat knew it was not the Forsaken himself, only a skilfully-rendered mask applied over the man's true features by a weave of the One Power. Mirror of Mists. But he still felt his hackles rise, looking into those grey eyes, devoid of any species of emotion except possibly contempt. Seeing this reflection of his greatest adversary.

The other Warder, too, wore a familiar face, this one associated with better memories. Blue eyes that missed nothing in a face every bit as hard as Demandred's, a countenance that might have been hewn from rock. Shoulder-length hair, greying to the colour of iron, tied back with a thong of leather.

The man moved with an animalistic grace. _Cat Crosses the Courtyard._ The eye-blurring Warder cloak streaming in his wake, drawing the eye, deceiving it, right hand on the hilt of the long, slightly-curved heron mark sword of the Kings of Malkier. All of that was Lan, or seemed to be – except Lan had never sneered, nor swaggered as this man who wore his form did. Something Thom Merrilyn had taught Mat: _Know the gait, know the man_.

These two ranked amongst the very best blademasters this side of the Aryth Ocean, Warder-bonded to a former Aes Sedai of the Green Ajah. Mat Cauthon addressed the _sul'dam._ "Are you ready to make your presentation?" he asked.

The Leash Holder bowed. "Yes, Highness."

"Then begin."

The _sul'dam_ and _damane_ withdrew a few score paces to the left, so they could observe both Cauthon and the two Warders, who took up positions facing each other. The Aes Sedai's face furrowed with intense concentration, and the foxhead medallion went chill against his chest – an indication of the magnitude of the One Power that was being channelled.

Abruptly, the square and the Deathwatch Guard, along with 'Lan' disappeared, leaving 'Demandred' in the foreground. He stood, head thrown back in exultation, his foot upon the breast of a slumped white-cloaked form, a naked sword in his hand. There was blood on the blade.

On the background canvas, an apocalyptic battle raged – tattooed Sharans and Trollocs fighting a disparate mix of Seanchan heavy cavalry and the Band of the Red Hand. _To'raken_ and _morat'raken_ exulted in skies riven by lightning blasts, and lightning fell indiscriminately among the Darkfriends and the forces of Light. Demandred's Power-amplified voice blared over all, shouting down the war cries and screams and explosions. At once wrathful, prideful and petulant. "Al'Thor! Face me, you coward!"

The projection shifted – just as it had for Mat when he'd looked down upon the battlefield using Gateways – affording them a bird's eye view of the struggle. The clouds boiled like pitch over the long slopes of the Polov Heights where men and beasts struggled and died. The bleached grass slicked with blood, the parched ground heaving under the hammer of lightning strikes and churning flows of Earth and Fire as _damane_ duelled the Ayyad.

And there, riding as if possessed, leaning low over his horse's neck as he urged the willing beast on, was Lan. A lone, suicidally-determined man, weaving between heaps of bodies, a man with the luck of the Dark One on a big horse, black as pitch, the Warder cloak baffling, shifting, streaming behind him as he rode onwards, upwards, cutting down anything in his path.

Ahead of him, barring the path to the Heights, someone had marshalled Trollocs in a semblance of defence, an impenetrable barrier of pikes and spears to _Aan'allein_. The Man Alone. Lan did not even check at the odds. He spurred his horse, raising his sword in challenge. In readiness.

Arrows fell from the sky, singly then in flights, burning shafts to mark the path, followed by broadheads and bodkin points. An impossible range for any but Two Rivers bowmen. The Trolloc ahead of Lan fell, an arrow through its all-too-human eye. Tam al'Thor, wrapped in the Void, shooting with metronomic, flawless accuracy.

The Malkieri spurred into the breach carved by longbow shafts, sword swinging, and the view blurred panoramically to follow Lan's wild ride, as though from a vantage above and slightly behind the Warder.

Mat found himself flinching as a Trolloc catchpole tried to lasso him, breathed a sigh of relief as Lan's unerring sword severed it together with the hand of its wielder. Then Lan was through, riding hard, miraculously unscathed.

A handful of Sharans on foot in plate armour sought to stay him as he barrelled Mandarb in amongst them, throwing himself headlong from the saddle in a smooth rolling dive, coming up swinging in their midst, Lizard in the Thornbush splintering the tight formation that was their best protection from a Blademaster.

From that moment, the Sharans were dead men. The heavy infantry, armed with maces and axes, might have well been statues, defenceless against the speed and _focus_ of the Borderlander and his lancing blade. The last of the Sharans fell, Threading the Needle finding the man's unprotected armpit. Leaving Lan standing alone, unafraid.

 _The 'real' Lan, the Warder, not the representation on the backdrop,_ Mat realized, yet it was skilfully, almost seamlessly done. The viewpoint panned outwards, slowly rotating about its axis once again as Lan and Demandred faced each other down, and all the fighting, all the dying, all the sacrifice going on around the two combatants bled into quiet irrelevance, the world itself appearing to pause before the terrible apotheosis.

Demandred swung round upon him, irritation vying with malice. "Another one? Lews Therin, you are beginning to…"

The words died in the Forsaken's mouth as Lan leapt, spinning. Thistledown Floats on the Whirlwind. The blade keening to reap Demandred's head at a single impetuous blow.

Reeling backwards, the Chosen managed to interpose his sword, the Power-wrought steel both men wielded coming together in a scream of tortured metal. Lan pressed his advantage. Dandelion in the Wind. The Forsaken met his berserk ferocity with some of his own, both hands upon the hilt as he swung with a snarl. The Cyclone Rages. Lightning of the Three Prongs slashed open Demandred's cheek, just below his eye, but it was a wound he was happy to take to arrest Lan's almost irresistible momentum.

"Who are _you_?" Grudging respect in the Forsaken's voice as he took a backwards step, a rest in the measure of their dance.

"I am the man who will kill you" the Warder grated.

Lan stalking forward. Leopard in the High Grass. Pressing. Leopard's Caress. The deceptively slow thrust for Demandred's groin, met almost contemptuously by Folding the Air, the cultured parry easing the questing blade aside by a comfortable hand's span. Demandred riposted with Courtier Taps His Fan, a vicious, perfectly-judged counter that Lan adroitly sprang back from.

Demandred content to abide and wait. Sword in the high guard – Tower of Morning – inviting Lan to attack. The Malkieri, circling. Lan almost taunting Demandred with The Moon Rises Over The Lakes, and again with Reaping the Barley, flamboyant strokes best used against multiple opponents, great scything blows.

The Forsaken skittered aside, stutter-stepping, blocking without offering a reply. Cat on Hot Sand. Far too passive. 'Lan' had left himself _wide_ open for Hummingbird Kisses the Honeyrose. Demandred would _never_ have passed up an opportunity like that.

Mat frowned scornfully. Up to that point, he'd been immersed in the experience. "No, no, no, no. Burn me, no!" he shouted out, waving his hands for the production to cease, and the Warders froze motionless, mid-stroke. The warscape background vanished as the _damane_ released the weave, leaving the two combatants facing off. With a grunt of irritation, and a scowl, 'Lan' sheathed his blade. Folding The Fan. He even did _that_ with a complacent grace. _Arrogant lover of rotting worms!_

Mat rose to his feet, suddenly and unexpectedly angry. In some of his shadow-lives, he had learned the sword, knew the forms. But in none of those many pasts had he excelled with the short blade, far less been a Warder or earned the right to wear a heron-mark sword. For most of those lives he'd done the majority of his fighting from horseback, and a spear was the better choice of weapon from the saddle.

None of which changed the fact that Mat Cauthon knew his way around a fight, and it was a _bloody_ disgrace to showboat in a representation of the greatest duel of the Third Age. There was _no way_ Lan bloody Mandragoran would carry on like that. He'd stood beside the man enough times to know better.

Lan? He was as implacable as Death and just as certain. It was a style devoid of sentiment, of emotion. Beyond hubris. If he got in a fight, he'd finish it before the other fellow knew what was happening.

He turned his ire upon 'Lan'. "Kindly stop showing off. You're not here to show how bloody pretty your swordwork is, you're here to honour a better man than you'll ever be. And as for you, 'Demandred', you're supposed to be acting like the stuff of nightmares, and the only thing your bladework is threatening to do is send me to sleep."

He didn't expect any reply, so it was somewhat of a surprise when 'Lan' talked back. His tone was respectful, oleaginous even, but the words he couched dripped with sarcasm. "Perhaps His Grace would deign to give us a demonstration? Show us how this _better man_ would fare against our lesser lights?"

It was clear as day that this young fool thought the legend of Lan Mandragoran was overstated, abundantly clear that he considered himself preeminent, invincible. Oh, that heady combination of Light-given talent and youthful arrogance!

It probably didn't help that most of the senior Warders who might have shown him otherwise were laid in shallow graves scratched into the soil of Merrilor.

Mat coughed incredulously and raised an eyebrow. It had been a _very_ long time since anyone except Tuon had had the temerity to mock him so openly. _How refreshing. You cheeky gobshite!_ He found he was grinning, happy as a sandboy, as he hooked his _ashanderai_ from behind his chair, resting against the stave as he replied.

"Done! In fact, I'll go you one better. If you can beat me, I'll let both you Warders free with a pocketful of gold, and your Aes Sedai as well. I'll send you back to the White Tower with my blessing. If I thump you until you quit, well, you'll do me the honour of shutting your faces, and merely play your parts as directed in future without any more backtalk!

If the wager is not to your liking, well... then you'll do what I say anyway, otherwise what is the bloody point of being the Prince of the goatkissing Ravens? One thing's for sure. I intend my wife's naming-day present to be perfect, and not besmirched by your hammy acting!"

'Lan' looked back at him incredulously. "You really think you can take _two_ Blademasters at the same time?"

Mat shrugged, and offered a vulpine grin. "No idea, frankly. But when a man's bored, and nobody will take his wagers, any gamble looks good."

Mat turned back to Leashed One and Leash Holder. "My compliments, ladies, for a job well done. Keep it up." That panoramic weave of Illusion and Mask of Mirrors must have been incredibly labour-intensive as the _damane_ 's pale skin was beaded with sweat. It was hugely impressive, at times as immersive as being there, while the trick of rotating the scene to afford different vantages – if a bit dizzying the first time one experienced it – was something unique. Unprecedented, really. He wondered what Thom Merrilyn would have made of it, then grinned. The grouchy old court-bard would have considered it a vulgar form of entertainment, suitable only for the rabble. Peasants like him, in other words. He could only hope Tuon would disagree with the sentiment.

Mat stripped off the heavy quilted fabric of his ceremonial general's uniform, wanting to be free of the restrictive garment with its constricting shoulder padding, to stand bare-chested. It was surprisingly cold. His baggy trews were slightly more practicable, but he rolled up the bottom few inches so they would not trail to trip him. Just like a Sea Folk Cargomaster.

The Raven Prince rolled his shoulders experimentally, testing the grip of his battered boots on the smooth marble. You just could not beat a good set of boots you had worn in yourself, for all that there were whole battalions of cobblers vying to provide him with new pairs in outlandish fashions.

He looked across at his opponents. The _damane_ had let the mask of Mirrors drop on both men, and he could see their true faces. 'Lan' was an Arafellin, a Borderlander. _He should flaming well know better!_ His braided hair was hung with small silver bells which chimed lightly. A ridiculous affectation, but one common to his people.

The swordsman was young, shockingly so, a boy's face wearing a boy's pride. As young as Mat had been, leaving the Two Rivers. A prodigy, they said, the youngest blademaster ever. But those eyes! This boy had killed to build his reputation. Had liked doing it. He was named Jearom, after the Blademaster of legend.

'Demandred' was in his thirties, with shoulders like a weaver's beam, and limber for his imposing size. An Andoran, unless he missed his guess. He was sandy-haired and tan – a far cry from the swarthy Demandred – with mild eyes, a soft-spoken man. To Mat, he looked as strong as Perrin. A dangerous man when roused. For all his unassuming demeanour, he had the right to bear a heron-mark blade.

There were only two ways a man could earn the distinction. One was an examination of swordsmanship evaluated by a panel of other Blademasters. The other was by killing a Blademaster in single combat. When he and his Aes Sedai had been taken by soldiers and _damane_ , the Seanchan Captain – a famous Blademaster – had wished to try the legend of the renowned Warders.

Darryl Harlan had accepted the man's challenge, had killed him within ten heartbeats. Before that, Harlan did not have the right to a heron mark blade. It was an irony peculiarly Seanchan that he had earned the distinction of a heron-mark blade and bore it in captivity as a slave's bondsman. The Empire. Where talent was never wasted.

Mat doffed his hat, slinging it onto his chair. The _ashanderai_ felt limber in his hand, held lightly at the balance point in his right hand, the long haft couched idly in the crook of his elbow. "Whenever you're ready, lads" he invited them.

Jearom flashed Harlan a prideful glance. "Stand aside. He's mine."

Harlan shrugged, eloquently, and sheathed the long blade he'd been carrying almost absent-mindedly without protest. "Have at it" he offered the younger man, encouragingly, before turning to watch proceedings with interest.

There were fifty paces between Mat Cauthon and the young swordsman as he stalked the Raven Prince down. Cat Crosses the Courtyard became Leopard in the High Grass, a sidling, twisting, deceptive gait that reminded Mat all too well of Couladin. Jearom's sword was still undrawn, on his hip.

Twenty paces, and Mat watched him intently, ready, anticipating the sudden acceleration, the blistering rapidity which made Jearom so lethal. He sensed rather than saw the young man preload his legs, ready to leap and with the instinct of a thousand years moved first, _forward_ not back, a thousand years of training telling him to do the unexpected, rather than what dogma and most people's natural inclination screamed at such times – to back off and use the length of the spear, to keep the swordsman at range.

He nearly died for it.

It was also the only thing that kept him alive.

Mat saw the flicker of intent in Jearom's eye, and then the Blademaster was upon him. Blacklance's Last Strike. The swordsman ripped the sword from the scabbard and out into the lunge that would have killed him in a single fluid motion, faster than Mat would have believed possible, the blade intended for his throat. Faster than the _gholam._

Ignoring his own weapon, Mat threw himself upwards and sideways to the right with everything he had, trying to hit the man before the weapon was free and into him.

They collided halfway. The Prince of Ravens crashed into the swordsman bodily, shoulder first, feeling the heron-mark sword scrape a shallow trench across his ribs rather than entering his body. The impact of their bodies colliding punched the slightly-built Blademaster from his feet, throwing him onto his back on the marble flags.

Mat hit the ground hard, on his side, rolling awkwardly. Instinct kept his death-grip on the haft of the _ashanderai._ Gingerly, he pushed himself to his feet. This was no sparring match, no sporting wager as he'd intended. What had just transpired was nothing less than attempted murder.

Deathwatch Guards lowered their weapons, preparing to cut down the swordsman. Jearom was laughing, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. Completely unafraid. He was obviously insane. Rabid. He'd tried to _kill_ Mat, for no better reason so far as he could see than the chance at immortality as a regicide. The man who slew the famous Mat Cauthon. The swordsman must have known that he would certainly die for it, even if he succeeded, and he didn't care. Short of killing the Dragon Reborn, it was as close to immortality as a man like Jearom was ever going to get.

Mat's voice halted the Deathwatch Guards in their tracks. "Leave him be. This is between me and him."

The soldiers reassumed their parade positions. They would not move, now, unless at Mat's command, or unless the Empress arrived, in which case her safety would take precedence.

Mat looked over at the swordsman. "We gamble. I called, now you raise. Fair enough. Now that we're both all in, humour me. Tell me why."

There was real indignation in the young man's voice. "Can you imagine what it's like for someone like me, in an Age like this? What have you left for me? Mumming the part of men like you, knowing that I'll never have the fame, the _name_ of a man like Mandragoran. Knowing that whatever I accomplish, I'll always be considered the lesser man."

Hot eyes, with tears starting in them. "At least, when I kill you, they'll know who I am."

Mat nodded. Padan Fain had taught him there was no reasoning with madness. "Fair enough. Time to show our cards."

Time like cool honey. Jearom attacked with unrestrained abandon. The Boar Rushes Downhill. Apple Blossoms in the Wind. Striking the Spark. Brutal, ferocious. The work of a gifted lunatic. So many slashing sword-forms. The point beats the edge – that was the standard doctrine, but the young prodigy was so fast and fearless there wasn't time for anything other than desperate defence.

Knotai could now see why Harlan hadn't been able to work an opening against the younger man. There simply wasn't time. Mat took a stinging cut to his forearm, another to the brow. That could be problematic. Blood in the eyes, blinding.

Jearom backed off, giving Mat badly-needed respite. His skin felt clammy, numb from the blood-letting. A bad sign. His lungs laboured like Master Luhhan's bellows. _Too much easy living._

Mat saw the _sul'dam_ and _damane_ , prostrate on their bellies, faces pressed against the flags in supplication. Whatever happened here, their lives would also be forfeit. Harlan merely sat placidly, knees drawn up to his chest, the picture of relaxation. Watching the duel unfold with the equanimity of a farmer watching a quarterstaff bout at Bel Tine that he hadn't wagered upon. His worn peasant's face was emotionless, despite the certainty of his impending death.

Jearom's voice now, salt on his wounds. "Tell me, Raven Prince. Tell me what I already know. Tell me I was better than Lan, than Demandred."

Mat shrugged. "Faster, for sure. Doesn't matter, though. You wouldn't have beaten either. They were _men._ You are a rabid dog. They would have just put you down. Out of your misery."

Mat saw it, watched as Jearom's face whitened, as pale as table salt, taut with anger at the taunt. Mat knew the truth in his own words. Knew what he needed to do. Set himself, like a spearman in the ranks as Jearom bore down upon him, wrath made flesh. Left foot before right, feet planted, lance couched low. Right hand on the haft to thrust, left hand forward to guide. Another spearman might have noticed the shortness of the abridged grip, right hand close to the centre of the stave. His eyes met Jearom's – wild, unfocused. A man without centre, a man without balance. A cyclone.

He flung himself upon Mat with those stooping, slashing harrier's strokes, impossibly fast, Mat blocking with the haft and easing backwards, pace by pace. Rain in High Wind, Leaf on the Breeze, then Arc of the Moon, a vicious back-cut, barely blocked.

Twisting the Wind almost ripped the spear from his grasp. Mat tried for a riposte, and almost paid with his life – Cat Dances on the Wall, an ingrained response as Jearom swept aside his strike and attacked his legs in one sleek, sinuous motion.

 _Don't play his game_ Mat told himself, _anything that plays into his conditioned reflexes. Make it a thinking man's fight._ He came forward again, cautiously, whirling the _ashanderai_ in a looping pattern about his body. For the first time in the fight, he forced the younger man on the defensive, and found that Jearom didn't like being taken out of his rhythm.

Instead of parrying, or backing off, Jearom sought to break through, Lightning of the Three Prongs nearly pushing through his guard. Fast and crisp as shuffling cards, sword blade and spear rattled together, interchanging blows in a burst of attrition, before inexorably, inevitably, Mat was forced to cede ground. Hummingbird Kisses the Honeyrose almost finished it, the sword blade grazing the side of Mat's neck rather than opening his throat.

Why the younger man didn't use more stabbing attacks, Mat didn't know, but he was grateful for it. By rights he should be dead. Mat had been living on borrowed time for a while now.

When it ended, it was sudden, anticlimactic. Ribbon In the Air – another slashing saber-cut, right to left as Jearom tried to work round Mat's guard. Like everything else the young man had thrown at him, it was perfectly executed, scintillatingly fast. The trouble was, Jearom kept using strokes to keep his foe bound in contact, keeping them passive, responding. Rather than parrying, Jearom sought to strike first. Rather than regulating the tempo of a fight, Jearom sought to be first, to be fastest.

Mat had shaped up to lunge, and Jearom was faster, _much_ faster, slipping right and cutting left, with Ribbon in the Air. Fast. Faster than thought. The wrist-cut, aimed at Mat's undefended torso, took the spear out of play. It was also a mistake.

Mat blocked the sword with his left arm. The spear, perfectly balanced in his right hand in the foreshortened grip, lancing out in reply. The young man was as quick as a weasel, and he didn't want to risk missing his target by trying anything flashy like trying to open his throat.

With a grunt of effort, Mat buried the long blade of the _ashanderai_ in Jearom's chest. Centre mass. The blade of the _ashanderai_ was heavy, like a cleaver or a short sword, with a single edge tapering to a point. It was regrettably facile, the way it punched into Jearom's chest, took his life, the spatulate end opening his ribcage and transfixing his heart like a bird trapped fluttering in its nest. _It should not be so easy, so inconsequential to take a life_ , Mat thought, dully.

There was surprise in Jearom's eyes as he toppled slowly backwards. He was dead before he hit the ground, the spear standing out from his body like the mast of a ship. Mat looked down at him. There was blood running from the corner of his mouth, and his teeth were bared, like a stoat in a snare.

With an effort, Mat looked up and addressed the _damane._ His legs felt unutterably weary and he didn't want to even _look_ at his arm. He couldn't feel it. Shock. Mat wasn't squeamish about the sight of blood. It was just seeing his own that tended to cause the distress. That and the severed tendons and muscles, that tended to unsettle a man's stomach.

There would be pain later, Mat knew all too well. The old memories had provided him no end of graphic illustration. Lots and lots of pain. Mat reckoned between his varied lives he'd been wounded in just about every conceivable way possible, (short of falling alive into the hands of Semirhage, of course). Well, that was life for you. Another bloody day on the Wheel of Time.

"Aes Sedai? Do you know where this man was from?"

She stared back at him, her hatred for him tempered by shock, incomprehension. "Highness, he was from Tifan's Well. A small town in Arafel."

"Does he have family there? A wife? Parents?"

"Family? Only his mother, Lord."

Mat then summoned the male _so'jhin._ "Take the details from the _damane._ I want his body sent home to his mother, so she can bury him. She has that right."

The _so'jhin_ nodded obediently. "We can have a _damane_ open a Gateway nearby, or Skim there even if we don't know the exact location."

"Whatever. Just see it done."

The _so'jhin_ had a further question. "My Lord. What if his family or neighbours have any questions about how he died?"

Mat paused, concentrating upon what he wanted to say. "He wasn't a martyr to a cause, nor did he die a hero's death. Tell them that ask that he died a senseless death a long way from home, pursuing a life of violence for its own sake, to the grief of his family." Mat's own voice felt like it was coming from a long way away, cool like water, expunged from the heat of the anger he felt.

"There is one more thing. What happened today was an affront to peace, to the Light itself. I am ashamed of my own part in it. In the land that bore him, they have a saying. _Peace favour your sword._ Swords exist only to ensure peace, justice and prosperity, in the hope of a day when there will be no further need of them.

I decree, in my capacity as Raven Prince, under the Light, by Imperial edict, that the man Jearom of Arafel's name shall be stricken from the roll of Blademasters from this day forth, in perpetuity. How then could it be otherwise? This man forgot the true use of a sword. He is no Blademaster. His punishment is not his death. His punishment is _anonymity._ May the last embrace of the Mother welcome him home. May the Light have mercy upon him. And upon us all. We men of war."

There was a silence. Then, unbidden, as one, the Deathwatch Guards, together with the Ogier Gardeners raised the butts of their spears a pace from the ground, before bringing them down as one with a sharp report on the cobbles. It was, Mat knew, a salute. And somehow, he knew it was for what he'd said, more than his victory in a squalid little duel upon the marble flags. There was a small, victorious smile upon his mouth as his knees buckled, and Mat Cauthon swooned and knew no more for a time.


	11. Chapter 11: Sente

**Chapter 11: Sente**

The Rahad was different than Rand remembered. Different and yet the same. The milieu of buildings and mortar were subject to change. People's nature changed more slowly. The Rahad was formerly a dangerous place, rickety, overgrown tenements jettying out to overhang narrow streets. Streets frequented by cutpurses and killers, eager hands clutching the hilts of long curved knives uncomfortably reminiscent of Padan Fain's cursed Shadar Logoth blade.

The former slum was a good deal more affluent, now. The slouching youth on the corner might have been tending a barrow of exotic fruit instead of being a posted lookout for one of the many feral gangs that had formerly run these streets before the Seanchan came, but he still spat through the gap in his teeth and scowled at Rand suspiciously. Many of the properties were new – constructions of cheap red brick – but better-built than the ramshackle timber-framed buildings they replaced.

The Rahad bustled, thronging crowds jostling. The ground floor of every building was a shop – weaver, tanner, grocer, glassmaker, tinsmith, farrier. Skilled labour for the most part, and folk with coin in their pockets to pay for it.

There wasn't a high Seanchan presence on the streets – one of the reasons Rand had chanced cutting through the Rahad – but he was regretting the choice just the same. This still wasn't a place where foreigners came often, and the Ebou Dari sizing him up saw a dark-haired foreigner with a pedlar's pack and travel-stained clothing. A stranger with a light purse. He wasn't welcome here, and his presence was drawing too many unwanted stares. He would be remembered.

 _What's done is done_ , Rand told himself. His pace quickened appreciably. He was nearly at his destination now. He crossed a broad well-maintained bridge of white stone that arched over the murky, turgid waters of one of Ebou Dar's numerous canals. This waterway seemed to be an unofficial demarcation separating the Rahad from the district surrounding the Tarasin Palace and the Travelling Grounds – the hub of the great city of Ebou Dar.

A left turn set him upon a broad highway – a principal artery running through the city – and evidently newly constructed. Along its way, tall pylons of wood reached into the sky like the masts of ships, high above the roofline at regular intervals a few hundred yards apart, their tops crowned with boxy stork-nests of wood. Rand could only guess at their purpose. Sentry towers of some sort? But if that was the case, why were there so many of them?

Rand surmised from the loaded goods wagons rattling to and fro that this road bore traffic to and from the Travelling Grounds and the Imperial Customs. It was a location Rand was keen to avoid. He had no business in Seanchan and wanted to avoid the scrutiny of Seanchan bureaucracy if possible – he didn't know whether he required documentation to be in Ebou Dar and he wasn't keen to find out.

The pavements flanking the highway on either side were broad, and Rand made swift, unimpeded progress on them into the heart of the city, before a hand-painted wooden street-sign indicated he needed to leave the route. His business was in the Tarasin Palace. Specifically, the wing designated for imperial _sul'dam_ and _damane_ where the Forsaken, Moghedien was recused.

At first, the increase in activity almost passed unnoticed by Rand. Traffic heading into the city was being halted at impromptu checkpoints, and turned back. Merchants inclined to argue soon changed their mind when confronted by implacable Seanchan heavy infantry.

Rand's eyes narrowed. Suddenly there were a _lot_ of troops on the street, moving assuredly in a coordinated manner to block all routes into the Inner City. And these weren't levy troops with their white chevrons. This was line infantry. Something was clearly up.

Rand tried to skirt the main streets, to work his way inwards towards his destination, hoping that he could make it before the Seanchan had established a perimeter. He slipped through a side-alley, which afforded him a tantalising glimpse of the Palace itself – and almost ran slap-bang into a Seanchan patrol of four men.

The sergeant in charge shook his head at Rand, gesturing back up the alley. "You need to leave, waylander. We are securing this area. Go back the way you came." Despite the slurring delivery, the words conveyed an unmistakeable hardness.

Rand briefly considered the idea of tackling the patrol, and immediately discarded it. He was unarmed apart from his belt knife. Whilst he thought he was capable of overpowering these men, he knew the near certainty was that even if he prevailed, one of them would surely have time to raise the alarm.

He thought once again of using his _ta'veren_ ability – hitherto untested – to stop these men's hearts in their chests. He rejected the idea almost as soon as it formed. _Light, no._ These were just men doing their job, and they hadn't threatened him.

He decided to play for time as his mind raced. With the best grace he could muster, he tried a placatory smile. "Officer, I'd arranged to meet a girl in that square yonder. She isn't the kind of woman you'd want to stand up and run the risk of losing, if you catch my drift." Rand improvised. "Short chestnut hair, eyes to drown in … and the prettiest little bottom in Ebou Dar." _Light, he was describing Min,_ Rand realised. He spread his hands imploringly. "Light, lads, have a heart!"

He could tell they weren't buying what he was selling. He supposed any expression looked forbidding on Moridin's lantern-jawed face. He considered his travelling garb, too. No, not the clothing of a man on an assignation. Maybe falling back upon his rustic charm had been a mistake. The sergeant just shook his head flatly.

That only left one option. "Look, officer, how about I give you a few Andoran silver marks for you and your lads to drink the Empress's health and look the other way. I promise that in your absence I won't invade anything bigger than a snug inn with a warming fire!" he added with a self-deprecatory smile.

If possible, the Seanchan's face grew harder. There was a snarl in his tone as he addressed Rand. "We are the fighting men of the Winged Hammer, Andorman. We don't compromise. We don't take bribes. Our loyalty is unconditional. If it weren't that you are a foreigner that does not know our ways, we would take you into custody. But I don't fancy spending the time writing a report. Just… go. Bugger off. Turn around and get lost, before I change my mind."

 _The Winged Hammer?_ It was not a regiment Rand had heard of. Which meant it was clearly a crack regiment out of Seanchan, and likely an aerial one, as the name suggested. He had the feeling he'd stumbled into something very dangerous indeed. It was time to leave. He nodded his head in assent and turned on his heel, heading back the way he'd came.

A clatter of beating wings high overhead made him look up. That was a flying wedge of _raken_ inbound, imperiously sweeping into the city, roughly following the line of the main avenue he'd been on earlier. As he watched, a red flare kindled, tossed lazily from the saddle far above. It was answered by the sudden ignition of red flares from the tall mast-like towers he'd observed on both streets, and he understood in part. Fireworks, like those Aludra had made. _Landing flares._ What in the Light was going on?

Traffic scattered on the main street, the beasts of burden instinctively shying away in terror as a squad of immense _grolm_ thundered up the street, careless of the crowds, who squalled and scattered, panicked. As Rand watched, horrified, a youth fell and was trampled under their chitinous cleft hooves as the bear-sized three-eyed beasts tore onwards at a breakneck pace.

In their wake, a turma of _lopar_ followed, sleek powerful forms keeping pace easily, all feline grace. These beasts were the shock troops of the Seanchan Empire, highly intelligent and ferocious animals, bred for war. What manner of man would turn them loose within a city? _Demandred. Sammael. But they were dead._ Behind them, a hundred Seanchan light infantry, running for all they were worth to keep up. Wherever they had come from, it couldn't be far away. _Somebody's opened a few extra gateways outside the city, or just inside the walls,_ Rand guessed. There were a fair few squares suitable to the purpose other than the Mol Hara.

It was clearly an invasion. He could even guess the outline of the plan that the invader was working to. It was like a Stones board. _Moyo moyō_ to begin – a series of apparently arbitrary placement of stones. Gateways had changed _everything._ Leaving the defender trying to work out the attacker's objectives, intuit where the concentration of his forces would be unleashed. All of a sudden, the defender would realise that these initial casual placements had become the framework for annexing territory.

What next? _Sente._ Keep the momentum, the initiative, while turning potential territory staked out in the preceding phase into real gains. Sudden bursts of aggression to panic the defender, hoping to pick away at his holdings. _Raken_ and _to'raken_ to deploy Fists of Heaven and Bloodknives to wreak havoc behind enemy lines and destroy morale as well as assassinating key enemy personnel.

All the while shoring up, consolidating. Heavy infantry to invest key areas, backed up with _damane_ and _sul'dam._ Flying columns of heavy cavalry, lancers and war-beasts to soften up the enemy. And in a protracted fight, the gunpowder weapons that Aludra had invented, and which the Band had brought to Seanchan. Dragons.

There was the rumble of thunder across the city, lightning falling from a clear sky. _Damane_ fighting. Rand felt a chill course his spine. Whoever the attacking general was, he was very, very good. His style reminded Rand of Mat Cauthon, except there was no way Mat would prosecute attacking a city full of innocent people in this fashion. The aggressor was relentless, cold-hearted and above all, bold. It was the slashing style of a young man, utterly confident in his own abilities.

Rand hurried now, almost running to keep abreast of the crowd escaping the chaos on the high street by flooding the back alleys. It was a terrible thing to consider, but could he take advantage of this chaos to infiltrate the Tarasin Palace somehow? He made maybe a quarter-mile on his reconnaissance when he realised that things had definitely taken a turn for the worse.

Belatedly, Rand finally noticed the presence of the man tailing him. An old man. His stalker had been canny enough to pass unobserved until now, when the contrast between the shoaling, panicked crowd and the single-minded intent of his pursuer had become readily apparent. Whoever he was, he didn't scare easy, and in this turmoil, that marked him as capable. Perhaps truly dangerous. Rand hurried, trying to shake his tail, squeezing into an alley and emerging into a small square, where he stopped in his tracks.

There were a pair of _damane_ and a good dozen billmen confronting him across the cobbles. Their full attention was on him. Faces blanched white with terror amongst the soldiers, even the _damane_ and their haughty _sul'dam,_ but they were clearly determined, resolved. Those gleaming glaives, lowered in wary menace, looked well-honed and the men bearing them familiar with their use, but it was the channellers Rand was worried about.

Before he could even _blink,_ the air encased him in manacles of stone, and somehow Rand knew that the nearest _damane_ had hurled a shield at him with everything she had, trying to prevent him touching _saidin,_ even trying to sever him from the Source. The bafflement he saw in her eyes attested to what she'd found – that there was nothing _to_ sever.

It had been a desperate ambush – almost pitiful if he truly had been Moridin. He could have easily ripped apart a single shield in an instant, unless the _damane_ had been as strong as Alivia, or Semirhage. Then they would all die. _Sul'dam, damane_ and soldiers alike.

Briefly, Rand considered trying to kill the _damane_ – or maybe the _sul'dam_ – before setting aside the idea _._ The _damane_ had no free will, and were as much hostages to the situation as he was. He knew intimately how that felt. Semirhage had forced him to wear the Domination Band. Had compelled him to try and kill Min.

Rand understood that a failure to murder these women would likely result in his own death, as by their way of thinking, there was simply no way for them to take him safely into custody. But he couldn't bring himself do it. It was one thing to slay Semirhage, one of the most evil people ever to have lived, to save Min's life. Quite another to kill this pair of _sul'dam_. What they did was reprehensible, but perhaps they were redeemable.

The final realisation that tipped the balance was that he recognised the uniforms of the grimly determined soldiers. The harlequin tabards draped over their breastplates were unfamiliar, but the badge upon them – an outstretched red hand – and the Old Tongue inscription below identified them as _Shen en Calhar._ The Band. Mat's men.

In the end, it didn't matter. The _sul'dam_ decided for him. A mace of Air clubbed his unprotected head, rendering him senseless.


	12. Chapter 12: Blood

**Chapter 12: Blood**

The door to her pen was jerked open with a hollow boom and Moghedien crouched shivering, blinded by the dazzling light that broke in upon her. The extremity of her fear made her torpid, made her muscles like water as she cringed in the deepest shadow of the box.

"Come out of there, girl, and be swift about it." A brisk, mellifluous voice even when inflected with irritation, a shirring soprano like the chiming of an Arafellin's silver hairbells. Yet the Spider felt her heart palpitating at the voice that haunted her nightmares. Her _sul'dam_ 's voice. Mistress Shanan clapped her hands together impatiently to accent the alacrity with which she expected to be obeyed. "You don't want me to have to ask twice, believe me. You are in enough trouble as it is."

Reluctantly, the Chosen began to crawl forwards into the light, towards her mistress. You could not stand upright in the _damane_ kennel. Another implicit lesson there, another reminder. Her hair, heavy with sweat fell across her face, an irritant, but Moghedien didn't trouble to brush it back from her eyes in her haste, not wanting to look upon the _sul'dam_ , a shadow wreathed in a corona of light. Not wishing either to see, or be seen. Her eyes blinked, becoming more accustomed to the dayglare.

A strong, cruel hand, snatching at her hair, yanking her head up. Her scalp burned with fire, but Moghedien schooled herself to show nothing. No anger, no irritation. Not even the humiliation that coursed through her. "Faugh! You are rancid, _damane_. I cannot abide uncleanliness or slovenliness. What have you been doing? You are soaked in sweat. No matter."

To the Spider, Mistress Shanan's face swam into focus, light and dark, depth and shade resolving from the monochrome harshness of pure light. The _sul'dam_ had a round face, iron-grey hair scraped back into a no-nonsense bun, pinned with a plain sliver of white wood. It was a stark countenance, dry skin ivory-white detailing every minor imperfection and blemish. There was no concealment behind cosmetics for Mistress Shanan. Eyes the smoky grey of silver beginning to tarnish studied her, at once seeming to delve towards her hidden heart while at the same time dismissing her as insignificant.

"I expect you know what you have done to earn this visit," the _sul'dam_ continued flatly. As calm as if she was discussing the weather. " _Damane_ lie like hens lay eggs, yet I thought I had cured you of the habit. And such a lie to tell!" There was incredulity in Mistress Shanan's voice, as for one who had crudely rejected a wonderful gift. "Truly, girl, I thought you had accepted your station, learned contentment in knowing your place. 'There is solace being sheltered, instead of cowering under open sky when the lightning falls'" the _sul'dam_ quoted condescendingly.

 _In the box_. _With your leash about my neck._ Moghedien thought, angrily. _That is where I am, you sententious whore._ Her anger was a liquor that fortified her flagging courage.

"Perhaps you would care to explain _this_."

In her open hand – as Moghedien had known it would be – was the familiar banked fire of the _cour'souvra_ in its silver cage, like a _damane_ leashed. Her heart seemed to fall, plunging into the depths within her like a small, hard pebble cast into the hunger that was the Strid.

"I know that it is not – as you told me – merely an item of personal jewellery" the _sul'dam_ proceeded, almost conversationally. "To-day, as I was dressing, I felt it warm beneath my touch, and for a moment, I saw a face, felt a presence looking in upon me. A dark-haired man with a square jaw and hunter's eyes. So, this trinket of yours, I think it is an object that uses the Power – an _angreal_ or _ter'angreal_ of those _marath_ ' _damane_ of their so-called 'White Tower' perhaps.

Which raises many questions. Questions I should have asked when I acquired you as a _damane_. I was incurious, perhaps lacking caution. You are no Sharan. If you stood amongst the Ayyad, you would have a tattooed face to mark you for what you are. And you are not one of those Aes Sedai, since you lie, and you have no compunction killing.

Most Aes Sedai make impractical _damane_ because of conflicts between the Three Oaths and the commands of their Handler. Therefore, you cannot have sworn the Three Oaths upon the Oath Rod. And you are uncommonly strong in the Power, which was why I was so keen to leash you, and not ask too many questions. Stronger than any _damane_ I have ever seen, and more skilled. I thought you just another _Atha'an Shadar_ Dreadlord, and did not concern myself further. _Marath'damane_ are _marath'damane._ Now I think upon where you were found, and I have another question: _Who are you?_ "

This last was uttered almost breathlessly, and the Leash Holder whetted her lips with her tongue. There was _avarice_ in her eyes, naked as any blade. "You see, I have a whimsical theory, far-fetched as it might sound. Are you one of the Forsaken, perchance?"

Moghedien thought as fast as ever she had in her long life. If this woman knew she was one of the Chosen, her value to her as a source of information – of the Age of Legends, of weaves – would be incalculable. She could see Mistress Shanan was alive to the myriad possibilities that could arise from having one of the Forsaken as her _damane_. Mistress Shanan could rise very high using Moghedien's repository of knowledge, if she was unscrupulous enough to contemplate it. As far as the High Blood, perhaps, in time.

On the other hand, she would fall far and hard if others discovered what and who her _damane_ truly was. ... And whether she divulged to Mistress Shanan her true identity or not, Moghedien knew that the _sul'dam_ would not cease interrogating her until she had divined the purpose of the mindtrap.

Slowly, hesitantly, Moghedien raised her eyes, until they met those of the Leash Holder with an effort. When she spoke, it was with a voice so quiet and toneless that the irritated _sul'dam_ was forced to lean forward to catch the words.

"Mistress, I never lied when I told you my name." Moghedien whispered in a cowed voice. She swallowed to clear a dry throat. "I was called Lilan Moiral when I was born three thousand years ago. I was an Aes Sedai of the Brown Ajah – lost in my scrolls and histories until I tired of being overlooked, patronised and used. Then I took the name Moghedien, when I Travelled to Shayol Ghul and swore to the Great Lord.

Yes, Mistress, I am one of the Chosen. As far as I know, I am the last of the Thirteen yet living. Forgive me my deception, Great Mistress. But now you know who I am, you can better use me for your advancement. I know where caches of weapons using the One Power are hid – stasis-boxes filled with shocklances, _angreal, ter'angreal_ of many kinds. I even know one such which contains a female _gholam_ – the most dangerous assassin ever created, loyal to the one who accesses it, and one that cannot be hurt by any weapon, even the One Power. ... Only..." And here, Moghedien tailed off, as if seeing a flaw in her proposal.

The _sul'dam_ stooped upon her like a hawk, siezing a handful of her hair and twisting it painfully so that Moghedien was forced to look up into her impatient and angry face. "Only what?"

"Only, Mistress Shanan... you will never see another sunrise." Moghedien snarled, and hurled herself forward, the tiny inconsequential scrap of wood in her hand stabbing into the _sul'dam_ 's neck. The enraged Seanchan woman screamed – more in fury than pain, barely feeling the wooden shard go in – and struck at Moghedien with a ringing open-handed slap as the Forsaken barrelled into her, bowling her over onto her back.

The Spider landed on top of the indignant Mistress Shanan. She was bigger, and this body was younger – stronger than that of the _sul'dam_ who screeched and tore at her with her fingernails – strong enough to pinion her flailing opponent. She tore the improvised weapon free, bearing down, ramming it back into Mistress Shanan's throat. Deeper. The _sul'dam_ didn't cease bucking and shrieking – curses, threats and imprecations. Even in her extremity she was far too arrogant, too consumed by the struggle to think of calling for help.

Moghedien almost lost the wooden knife. It was exhausting, filthy butcher's work. Blood everywhere from the Leash Holder's savaged neck. Forcing the slippery wooden splinter through the sinew and gristle to slowly rend the woman's windpipe and sever her jugular. Sweat in her eyes, bangs of hair occluding her vision. It was taking forever, every second spent increasing the risk of discovery, apprehension. Moghedien ripped at Mistress Shanan, who was still yowling and fighting for her life in an agony of fear, raking at Moghedien's wrist and at her eyes with sharp fingernails like a wildcat.

It was the first time in her long life that Moghedien had actually killed anyone with her own hands, not with the One Power or by indirect means. Were it not for the hate she bore, Moghedien would not have been up to the task – smelling the sour admixture of fear sweat, blood and perfume of the woman she was killing. Her hand, grimy, rimed with wet and drying blood to the wrist, was cramping with the effort.

But there was a pleasure too in it, was there not? Of seeing the eyes of the woman who'd beat, tortured and subjugated her bulging with fear. Seeing the recognition dawning in those arrogant eyes that this was no temporary act of rebellion to be stamped out. It was intimate in a way that killing with the Power never could be. And for a red moment the Spider was glad she'd had to get her hands dirty.

The woman she was slaughtering like a hog ceased fighting, eventually. There was muddy incomprehension in her eyes. Her hands came up, fluttering weakly, perhaps pleading. Her windpipe had been cut, but Moghedien could make out the word she was enunciating clearly enough. "How?"

Then with a sudden freshet, the knife finally gouged Mistress Shanan's jugular and blood jetted violently in reward, rich and arterial, hot blood that liberally drenched Moghedien's face and chest. Her gorge heaving with revulsion, the Spider shoved the dying woman's body violently away and staggered to her feet, unsteady, blinking. She looked back at the body lying there on the lacquered floor, the centre of a swiftly-spreading and rapidly coagulating pool of blood.

The splayed body still had tenebrous life in it. Barely. The _sul'dam_ had lost control of her bowels and the reek of piss and shit commingled with the coppery tang of blood. A solitary fly looped lazily, already drawn by the rich odours, and Moghedien dry-heaved momentarily before regaining a measure of control.

Just a dead old woman. She had seen many such over the centuries. Far worse sights than this. Yet Moghedien's hands would not stop trembling. In an effort to still them she folded them under her arms, furtively glancing about her as she took stock. _Elated. Terrified_. Another feeling, so unfamiliar it took her a while to recognise it. _Ashamed_.

She was out of the box.

For whatever that was worth.

 _My way is best. Softly, softly in the shadows._

Her sudden outburst of violence – however premeditated, however cathartic – went against the strategy she had cultivated for three thousand years. It was, she acknowledged, the bastard child of her hate and loathing, and the unexpected glimmer of hope. It had been rash. Impulsive. And her plan of escape – such as it was – was in tatters. Improvisation at short notice was never her forte. Desperation would have to serve in lieu of deep-cunning. Desperation and the Great Lord's luck.

Swiftly, she stooped to rifle the cooling corpse of the _sul'dam_. The _cour'souvra_ lay unimportant upon the floor, glued to the wood by viscous drying blood. Carefully, carefully, she pried it free, looping the chain it hung on about her neck.

Further examination of Mistress Shanan's effects yielded the bracelet belonging to her leash. It lay in a pocket of her robe, and there it would remain for all of her – when her fumbling hand touched it, a sickening bolt of numbing pain paralysed her hand like the sting of some monstrous wasp.

Moghedien had hoped she would be able to use her own bracelet to unlock her _a'dam_ because of her damaged collar, but this would not be the case. With it, much of her burgeoning hope died. With the Power still denied her, escaping the Tarasin Palace was nigh impossible.

Could she pass herself off as a _sul'dam_? Her mistress owned an apartment that comprised her own living quarters and a training room in which her _damane_ were housed. Currently, the Spider was the only _damane_. This room was bare, by intent containing little of use except a washbasin, a full-length mirror and a pitcher of water.

Swiftly, Moghedien stripped naked, peeling the blood-soaked silk from her. Desperately, she began trying to wash herself in the cold water. Within seconds, she recognised it was a hopeless task. Her hair was clotted into a matted tangle with blood, set hard enough that tugging at the knots almost snatched her bald-headed and the water in the pitcher intincted crimson without doing more than appearing to smear the blood-stains about her body. What made it doubly, a hundred times more frustrating were that with a simple weave she could stand clean and immaculate, as virginal as a Bel Tine maid – were the Power not denied her.

Her fear-sensitive hearing was assailed with the sound of fighting, both far off and near. She felt the Power being wielded strongly and the hammer of lightening being wielded charging the air. She had the Great Lord's luck, after all. It sounded like a full-scale battle was taking place somewhere nearby.

Moghedien laughed incredulously. Maybe she was _ta'veren_ for all that! All the same, the murder she had committed had been messy, prolonged and noisy. It would only be a matter of time before somebody came to investigate.

She looked in the mirror, and almost recoiled at the wild-eyed ghoul who stared back at her, smeared grimy with blood from head to foot. Making a sudden decision, she entered Mistress Shanan's room. She found the first item she was looking for quickly – a sharp-bladed pair of long-handled hair scissors. She found a block of lilac-scented soap – so much the better.

Trying to wash the blood out of her long hair having proved futile, she swiftly began to cut her hair, working fast, more like shearing a sheep than giving a haircut.

Dark matted hair fell, and Moghedien grunted when she hurt her scalp with the blade of the scissors or pulled a recalcitrant knot, but carried on regardless. It was swiftly done, and the Spider looked in the mirror, to see her hair down to an uneven, ragged inch-long buzz-cut. She grimaced at her reflection. Better than the blood-soaked mess it had been, but still awful and it would doubtless draw attention.

Maybe she could find a hat or a veil or wimple? Moghedien doubted that the _sul'dam_ owned such items. Certainly, she had never seen her wear them. No time for thinking. No time to freeze, paralysed by indecision.

She lathered up with soap and water and grudgingly the blood began to come off. In her haste, half the blood-tinged water slopped carelessly onto the floor. Cleaning-up was low on the list of her priorities just now.

Finally, clean and dripping wet, the Spider tore back into Mistress Shanan's room, tearing the cotton undersheet from her four-poster bed, swiftly towelling herself off with it. Dragging the blankets from the bed, she threw them on top of the spilled bloody water in her quarters. Still naked, pebbled with goosebumps, she used the blankets to clean up the mess she'd made washing herself. Lastly, she rolled the _sul'dam_ 's body up in the blanket, throwing it over her shoulder and dragging the burden into her chambers.

The first thing she did in the bedchamber was to tear a pillowcase off its pillow, opening it up to make a loose bag which she placed upon the floor. By carefully manipulating the dead woman's clothing, she managed to tip the controlling bracelet into the pillowcase bag. She tipped a double-handful of aromatic woodshavings that Mistress Shanan had liked to burn as incense in after it.

Taking great care not to touch the offending item, she gingerly tied a knot in the bag, and headed into her mistress's closet. There there was a garderobe – a privy emptying into a running sewer. The Spider dropped the bag containing the buoyant woodchips and the bracelet through the wooden seat and into the water-channel, hoping the wood-shavings would keep the bag afloat, and that the sewer would carry the loathsome thing far from here.

Moghedien then turned her attentions back to her slain enemy. There was a large wardrobe, sparsely populated with clothes. Moghedien unceremoniously dumped her former mistress – bloodstained blankets and all – into the bottom of the capacious wardrobe.

The Spider removed the clothing from the wardrobe, laying them on the bed, considering what she could wear. The _sul'dam_ and she were much of a size, but all the dresses were plain. No distinguishing _sul'dam_ dresses, banded with lightning. She rummaged through the drawers. Nothing. _Mother's milk in a cup!_ The only Leash Holder garb in the apartments was soiled. Blood-fouled and unusable.

Fatalistic, Moghedien shrugged on the best of the dresses, a clinging black silk dress embroidered with chrysanthemums on the hem. It was a little tight in the bust but otherwise a reasonable fit. The formal dress of a woman for attending balls. The Spider wondered archly just how long ago the old gore-crow had last worn it in public. With trepidation she returned to the mirror.

With her staring, nervous eyes and close-cropped hair, there was little realistic chance that she would pass unchallenged even if _Tarmon Gai'don_ itself was recommencing outside in the Palace. She looked at the bowl upon the dresser, containing the best of Mistress Shanan's meagre collection of silver and gold jewellery.

In the bowl were also a selection of fake nails, long and lacquered – the mark of the Blood. The _sul'dam_ was not of the Blood, herself, but the pathetic objects she was forbidden to wear perhaps represented her hidden aspirations.

When it came to her, the idea was so audaciously simple that Moghedien almost burst out laughing, in spite of her predicament. She peeled off the dress again, rummaging through her victim's portmanteau until she found a straight-razor. Swiftly but with care, she began to attend to her hair again. Locks of hair fell, until she had shorn both sides of her head, leaving a single neat strip down the centre.

Giving herself an appraising once-over, Moghedien regarded the neat work. _Hide. Work from the shadows._ How better to do that than to assume a rank that meant most folk would lower their eyes, would just see the symbols of status and not the woman who wore them? She considered for a moment shaving off the rest, assuming the rank of the High Blood, before discounting it. Their faces would be far too well known to chance it.

Once again, she shrugged on the black dress. Carefully, she applied two lacquered fingernails to her right hand on the ring and index finger – denoting a high enough station that she would outrank most others, ensuring even most of the Blood would lower their eyes. These Seanchan and their hidebound adherence to feudal hierarchy! No real Seanchan would dare attempt what she was doing. The punishment for that transgression was horrific. Likewise, by the same token no Seanchan would likely question her for an impostor.

She considered Mistress Shanan's collection of jewellery, and decided in the end that none of the items were of sufficient quality. Less was more. Besides, she had the _cour'souvra_ , did she not? A relic of the Age of Legends would be exactly what a Seanchan noblewoman would aspire to wear.

The main real problem that presented itself would be her accent. Moghedien doubted her ability to mimic the Seanchan drawl well enough to fool a native. But the Seanchan had a practice of naturalising nobles from this side of the Aryth Ocean – so long as they swore the oaths to wait, obey and serve. She could brazen it out, and hopefully any mistakes she made would be excused by her non-Seanchan heritage. Say little. Dominate the room by force of will, cowing one's inferiors with a glance. Come to think of it, being a Chosen was the perfect preparation for imitating one of these arrogant primitives!

Moghedien gave the apartment a cursory once-over. There was a large bloodstain where Mistress Shanan's body had lain – the blood too thick and coagulated to be easily expunged. She shrugged and returned to her former mistress's room, with effort lugging a sofa through and depositing it squarely over the bloodstain.

Damage limitation. It might pass a cursory look, that was the best she could hope for. None of her attempts at concealment would pass any but the most perfunctory search, but all the truly incriminating evidence of what had taken place was out of plain sight, once she swept up her hair clippings.

It was time to leave. In a half-hour – with some luck – Moghedien could be out of Ebou Dar. Then she could try and find someone to remove the _a'dam_ – some unwitting wilder, a well-meaning Aes Sedai perhaps – before somebody else put on the bracelet and compelled her to return.

She took a deep, calming breath. She had her own _cour'souvra_ again. Her tormentor was dead. Who knew? Maybe the bracelet would never be found. Maybe the damaged leash couldn't be used to compel her anymore. The Spider felt a welcome surge of optimism.


	13. Chapter 13: Strife

**Chapter 13: Strife**

"Wake up, Damned."

A rough hand shaking his shoulder, his face slapped ungently by a horny palm. Rand woke groggily, feeling the sensation of his feet being dragged unwillingly across the cobbles as he struggled to comprehend his situation. He was being borne between two burly soldiers. Band of the Red Hand. Greybeards, but hard and strong. He struggled to recollect the preceding events.

Rand groaned as his head swam with agony, again when he realised his predicament. _Damned._ That was one of the new names for the defeated Forsaken, in an age when the Light had claimed victory.

He was being dragged hastily, the centre of a small column of hurrying men headed by a pair of _sul'dam_ and _damane_. The Band glanced all about them, as if expecting imminent attack. The streets were a chaos. There was looting, people running, shouting, shoving. Soldiers fighting. Rampaging squads of _lopar,_ slashing at men with their taloned hind-legs. Seanchan fighting Seanchan.

Thankfully, nobody seemed too willing to tangle with the Band veterans. Or maybe none of the combatants knew what side the Band were on. The presence of the _damane_ with them was likely the main discouragement to the contesting forces – thankfully none of the Seanchan on the ground had _damane_ here. Yet. It was a vision of chaos. He shut his eyes.

"None of that, you bastard. Open wide." A man pinched his nose. His fellow stuffed a handful of some dried weed into his reluctant mouth, clamping a grimy fist over his mouth to ensure he swallowed it. The taste was chalky, alkali. Foul. Forkroot. A herb that prevented channelling.

The soldier nodded approvingly as Rand grimaced, gagging, swallowing. "Get that down you, you murdering coward. It'll stop you using the Power, but won't stop you bloody walking. I'm _done_ flaming carrying you." Hatred in his narrowed eyes. "Vanin said to bring you to Lord Mat alive, but I lost a lot of friends all over Altara and Murandy and at Merrilor because of you, so I'm kind of hoping you'll try something cute." A sharp dirk appeared under his nose. "I'll stick this in your gut and pull out your innards. Just try me. Now walk."

Rand felt a shove and began walking. His hands were tied tightly behind his back. Ropes, not the One Power. _Interesting._ He wondered if the _damane_ were freed up for fighting. Ropes or the One Power, he wasn't going anywhere. He couldn't channel worth a light, of course, but how could they know that? Not that the Band were taking any chances. Forkroot made you drunk, incapable when it came to seizing the Power, but except for churning unpleasantly in his stomach like one of Nynaeve's foul concoctions, Rand was unaffected.

A fist in the back of his head, a hurry-up. "Faster." He made a shambling trot, between soldiers that were now moving at the double, their pace only a little short of an outright run.

The top of the street they were barrelling along led back again to the Tarasin Palace. _Ta'veren luck._ Well, at least he was going the right way. A _raken_ swooped by, hugging the rooftops hard, dodging and weaving, its long sinuous body straining, leathery wings beating hard, its rider leaning low over his mount's serpentine neck, urging the _raken_ on.

With an earsplitting crash, the rooftop the flying beast had just passed exploded, fountaining tiles, bricks and timber into the street. _Impressive,_ a detached part of Rand's mind observed, his eyes still full of the glowing red lozenge-shaped afterimage. The weave was called Blossoms of Fire – one he'd rediscovered, and a vicious thing it was too – hurling a bar of Earth, Air and Fire ten feet tall and the width of a man's arm.

Where the weave struck, it produced an intense explosion that incinerated everything within thirty paces. It was a technical and very power-intensive weave, and just about the most devastating, save for the forbidden Balefire. _Tarmon Gai'don_ and the events preceding it had led to an arms-race, with many terrible weapons of the ancients being reanimated by the Dragon Reborn. Another reproach for him to bear.

But the attackers with the _raken_ -riders evidently had _damane_ of their own, leashed weapons, trained to kill. A flurry of Deathgates flickered into existence, obliterating the side of the building that the Blossoms of Fire had been hurled from.

Rand winced. That was _clever._ Clever like Sammael. The _damane_ who'd exposed herself was almost certainly dead, diced like a radish. One of the many nasty things about a Deathgate attack was it destabilised the affected area in space and time, making it almost impossible to open a gateway and escape the scene.

Unless the _damane_ in the building already had a Gateway open and ready to bolt into, she was finished. And an expenditure of the requisite amount of power to open a Gateway would have been obvious a mile away, drawing an attack anyway.

Lightning struck wildly overhead, flickering forked, as _damane_ strove with _damane_ to harness the storm. A wild bolt from the heavens struck at them – probably by accident – and was adroitly turned aside. Fire, Earth and Air woven to earth the charge. The _damane_ with the Band were clearly under orders to stay out of the war of the One Power raging all around. Surviving it was their only aim. That and getting to their destination.

The attackers were winning. The chaos made it hard to ascertain their raw numbers, but the aerial reconnaissance being conducted by the nerveless daring of the _raken_ and _to'raken_ riders was a huge advantage to their side. Both sides fought with a terrible honed savagery and skill. Rand had heard of the vicious war, called the Reconsolidation, that Tuon had to fight to prevent the Seanchan empire disintegrating into a dozen warring states.

* * *

Semihrage had taken the patchwork cloak of the Seanchan Empire and _pulled,_ rending the fabric of a nation that had endured a thousand years. A war of race against race, of class against class, with a dozen claimants trying to secede from the Empire or take it over by force. Rebellions had been fostered under dozens of disparate causes, idealists and opportunists alike raising their banners.

An unlikely alliance of a High Lord called Handoin with the former Southron nations of Dalenshar, N'Kon and Khoweal, had coalesced – an alliance of the ruthless with the desperate. Handoin promised the Southern nations their independence in return for his dominion over the North and their cooperation against the forces loyal to Fortuona.

Handoin had initially prevailed against the other claimants and the revolutionaries – in part because he had large dominions and command of one of the biggest armies at the onset – but mostly because he was the most clear-sighted and ruthless. The land had burned, the sea poisoned as the Power was unleashed with malice aforethought.

In truth it was a chaotic mess. Many of the Southerners remained loyal to the Empire because it represented stability. Its heavy-handed presence had been the only thing preventing cycles of racial genocide and reprisal between different ethnic groups in Dalenshar – a conflict that was older and more entrenched than the Seanchan Empire. At the same time, N'Kon and Khoweal two of the richest provinces and the hearts of ancestral kingdoms predating Luthair's invasion, were always looking to secede, since they had been taxed extortionately in recent years. Why should they foot the bill for their poorer neigbours _and_ the Return, not to mention the Last Battle?

But even there, the shifting movement of populations meant many were loyal to the Empress, originally hailing from regions that traditionally were more stable in their allegiance. There could be no secession that would not be followed by endless war with the Seanchan empire and Seanchan loyalists within their borders. And even if the Empress was minded to let these provinces go, her rivals would have the mandate to tear her down for losing lands that had been under Seanchan dominion for a thousand years. The ethos, the central dogma of the Raven Empire, was stronger than the will of any individual, no matter how powerful or influential. Even an Empress.

So Fortuona had struck with clinical purpose, using the spear of Mat and the loyalists' jealously-guarded advantage in the new Weaves – Travelling in particular – to outclass and outgeneral the rebels. The insurgents had learned, adapted, but by then it was too late. Though heavily outnumbered from the onset, Fortuona's veteran forces had struck again and again where they could not be anticipated, with surgical precision. The Reconsolidation had lasted nearly two decades, and embers still burned. The Northern claimant had been put down savagely, the seceders in the South treated with greater clemency, but the war itself had been a cautery by sword and the One Power.

Mat's humane prosecution of the war had made it a soldier's conflict – with an emphasis on avoiding any collateral damage to noncombatants and the property that sustained people's livelihoods. Armed insurrection was punished, but civilians were spared. Often, the Raven Prince succeeded not just in defeating his foes, but engineering it so that the enemy was outfought, shown the possibility of annihilation, and given the option of surrender.

Mat had sought not just to limit his own losses, but those of his foes where it was possible. Yet it was still a terrible war, as both sides vied with the One Power and with force of arms. The forces of the Southern insurgency were no militia levy, but rebellious factions of the Ever-Victorious Army, highly-trained, superbly disciplined and well-led. Armies with _raken, lopar, grolm._ Armies with hundreds of _damane_.

Many times, Mat's clemency had been rejected, the enemy general choosing to obstinately stand his ground and watch his men die for it. And despite Mat's efforts, only the Light knew how many civilians had perished – from hunger, or disease and the travails of the road – or been made refugees, fleeing the fighting until Tuon's forces had restored order.

Tens of thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes. Rand wondered what it had done to Mat – being forced to put down a brushfire rebellion by folk who had in the main been deceived and led to destruction by a faceless foe whose only purpose had been to sow chaos and hate – and having to do it because his strategic acumen told him the alternative was _hundreds_ of years of war, _millions_ of deaths. Rand had borne that weight at Shayol Ghul. He reckoned Mat had shouldered it during the Reclamation.

It had been even worse in the North, where the White Boar, Handoin had proved the most difficult foe to dislodge. Not because he was the best general, but because he had divined the humanitarian restrictions the Raven Prince's forces were operating under. He had disguised troops and _damane_ as civilians, pursued a scorched-earth policy, deliberately driving his own civilians out of towns and cities to tie up Mat's troops dealing with the logistics of columns of refugees.

Mat's forces had also been plagued by all kinds of arcane warfare – it appeared that Handoin had inherited the training academy for the elite Bloodknives and with it, a large cache of the special _ter'angreal_ that made these assassins almost invisible and boosted their speed, agility and stamina. Relatively speaking, there were fairly few Bloodknives, but the damage they had caused was disproportionate, in materiel, in morale and crucially in information, and the Raven Prince himself had barely escaped assassination a handful of times.

In the end, Mat's victory over the White Boar had been a vindication of humanity against savagery, of humanity against nihilism, as Handoin was slain by his own officers, Northmen who had tired of the callous slaughter of their own people by a tyrant bent only upon dominion. The remaining forces had surrendered to Fortuona shortly thereafter.

The Ever-Victorious Army had improved, innovated, learned from the campaign, their successes and more particularly their reverses They were the forces who had broken the Shadow at _Tarmon Gai'don_ after the combined might of the Eastern Nations could barely hang on, and they had only increased their baleful repertoire of death during the Reclamation. They were the greatest war machine in human history, commanded by the Age's greatest general.

It was only Tuon's agreement to the Dragon's Peace – that and the combined might of Andor, its allies and the Black and White Towers – which prevented the Seanchan Raven Empire opening its maw to swallow the whole Earth. Yet despite this, there were always some Light-forsaken idiots stirring up trouble along the borders! Not to mention the Aiel – who nursed a smouldering resentment for the Seanchan, for taking many of their Wise Ones as _damane_. The Aiel viewed the Seanchan as a nation of _da'tsang._ A word which translated as being beyond even the concept of honour.

Rand feared for the Westland nations, and doubted his Dragon's Peace would last beyond Fortuona's lifetime. The best he could conceive of? The peaceful amalgamation of the Eastern nations and perhaps even the Aiel and Sharans into the Raven Empire, and hopefully if the process were slow enough, the free nations could change the Seanchan, even as they were subsumed, tempering the Raven Empire with the sense of honour and duty enshrined in _ji'e'toh_ and the calm humanity and togetherness of the Borderlanders, the Two Rivers, Andor. Perhaps as one nation, together, they would be better equipped to face _Shai'tan_ if he ever awoke to the World again...

* * *

Up ahead, a force of Altaran and Murandian irregulars in their white chevrons retreating in the direction of the Palace were set upon. The milling band of men, a hundred strong, were ambushed without warning, arrows flying from the windows and doorways of the overhanging dwelling. The rate of fire was relentless – evidently something similar to the improved repeating crossbows favoured by the Band.

The wavering irregulars looked to their Captain for leadership – a tall, confident man in a full-faced helm, barking commands – but when he fell, targeted by multiple arrows the rest broke under the withering storm, fleeing towards the Band. They split like a river around an island, fleeing around the resolute knot of men and _damane_ heading the other way.

Elements of the ambushing force poured out from side alleys and the buildings they had occupied. They moved swiftly, confidently, short, wiry men – and women – lightly-equipped with long, curved swords. The assailants were lightly armoured – breastplates of interlocking plates of steel and a kilt of leather reinforced with strips of steel as well as the distinctive Seanchan helms, but bare-legged above their boots. Their equipment looked pared down, minimalist, sacrificing protection for reducing weight.

At a guess, Rand thought they might be Fists of Heaven – the elite light infantry that were shock troops, forces intended to be dropped by _raken_ behind enemy lines. In that case, Rand sincerely hoped they were friendly, but he doubted it. Only the aggressors seemed to have _raken_ in the air.

There were other distinctive differences between these and other Seanchan infantry he had seen. Most line troops wore Tinker-bright uniforms of bright green and red, their officers' equipment gaudy, faced with gilt and ornamentation. However, like the Deathwatch Guards, these soldiers ominously favoured dark shades of colour, almost black. A matt red, with no green, a sullen red like jasper. He wondered what that portended.

Their Air Captain, a woman, easily identified by the crest and height of her helm pointed her sword directly at them in challenge. Her bannerman by her side bore a small sigil with a single jet-black feather upon it. With a scream, they led the charge, without even checking, not even when they saw the _damane_. Completely fearless. Perhaps the Red Hand banner the Band carried identified them well enough.

They made ten paces.

With a groaning, rending sound the earth surged under their feet like the cresting wave of a tsunami making landfall, the cobbles of the street and the ground beneath rising up and breaking upon them. The Wave of Earth broke upon the buildings too, debris pouring through ground floor buildings, stripping away the ornate stone and wood facade of a public house. Rand was slammed to the floor by its violence, even though he and the Band were far from the weave's epicentre.

Simultaneously, the second _damane_ raked the windows of the higher floors and sides of the buildings where the ambushing arrows had issued with Arrows of Fire, the white-hot filaments of Earth and Fire burrowing hungrily through the sides of the buildings as if they were paper.

It was clear that these two _damane_ had fought together many times, learnt the bloody work of street-to-street fighting. The wooden balcony of the tavern caught fire, instantly blazing, and Rand saw the painted wooden sign hung from its underside – a fat white goose – fall into the maelstrom beneath.

Then the earth mercifully stopped churning and for a moment, _damane, sul'dam,_ Rand and the Band all were still, ears still ringing, a tableaux, as they looked at the subsiding earth where their foe had been moments before. The air was dense, choking with finely powdered dust, reeking with billowing smoke. Then the _damane_ slapped the vision-obfuscating dust and smoke out of the air with a businesslike weave of Air, like a housewife beating a rug.

The female Air Captain had made it the furthest of their attackers. The ornate hilt of her sword, blade sheared off near the tang, lay where it had fallen from her hand upon the cobbles. Apart from that, of her and her company there was no other trace. Just the fallow earth, watered with their blood. One of the _sul'dam_ knelt and picked up the hilt, eyed it thoughtfully, then tossed it aside with a tight-lipped expression.

The Band's leader saw the look on the _sul'dam_ 's face and confronted her. "Do you know who our attackers are?"

The grey-eyed woman cast a haughty glance upon him, before deigning to give reluctant answer. "Not for sure. But the banner of the Raven's Feather is the sigil of Prince Uthair. The son of the Empress (may she live ten thousand years) and the Prince of Ravens. He holds the rank of Banner-General – or he did, the last I heard, unless he has been relieved of his command. As you know, male scions with a blood claim to the Throne are by convention not permitted to hold a greater rank in the Ever-Victorious Army."

The greyhaired Band leader gave her a disbelieving look. "That cannot be. He's the son of Lord Mat. Why would he attack the Band of the Red Hand...attack his own _father_? And burn me, _one banner_ could not cause the devastation he visited here." Rand considered the question. Three thousand foot or fifteen hundred horse could cause a lot of damage, but nothing on the scale seen here.

The _sul'dam_ favoured him with an icy, punitive glance. "You oathbreakers truly know nothing. The Blood all compete, scheme and plot to kill each other. The closer one stands to the Crystal Throne, the sterner the competition. And it cares not for ties of blood.

As for what his Banner can do, the Winged Hammer are an all-arms regiment. An army in miniature, with fifty _damane_ , fifteen hundred Fists of Heaven, twenty Bloodknives, five hundred repeating crossbows, detachments of _grolm, s'redit_ and _lopar_ , five hundred heavy cavalry. Oh, and enough _raken_ and _to'raken_ to bear the infantry wherever they might wish to go.

It was intended to be able to exist independently, move swiftly, have enough force to break an enemy's lines and raid behind, with incorporated air support. The Raven Prince devised it, and gave it as a gift to Prince Uthair, since he wished to pursue a military career, setting Tylee Khirgan in command until he learned his craft. He served in the regiment until he earned its majority. Seemingly, the Raven Prince's intent was to protect his son and keep him safe." She shrugged, suddenly weary, before gesturing at the warring city. "You may judge for yourself how _that_ turned out, _Captain_ Japheth."

Japheth snorted, and hawked spit. "Suppositions that change nothing. Our mission remains the same. We go to the Tarasin Palace and deliver our prisoner to Lord Mat. We fillet anyone who gets in our way. Get your _damane_ ready. We leave, _now._ "

The _sul'dam_ 's bow was incrementally lower than it should be, a hair's breadth from insulting. "As you wish it, Captain. I suggest you ready your troops."

Rand had spent the past minutes weighing up his options. He was pretty sure he could rid himself of his bonds using his _ta'veren_ gifts. The ropes were taut and had been expertly knotted, but he could 'persuade' the rough fibers to align just so, giving him the slack to slip the knot, maybe even cause the knot to unravel if he set his mind upon it. Of course, the rope was not sentient, you couldn't really persuade it of anything, but it was the way he best understood the way his gift acted upon reality. He made a choice from all the possible configurations of the matter in reality. The likelihood of the event happening spontaneously and the stability of the desired configuration impacted how easy or difficult the _ta'veren_ change was.

He'd experimented a little. Making a small fire – lighting his pipe for example – was relatively easy. Though spontaneous combustion of the tobacco was extremely unlikely, the required activation energy was quite low, and the distribution of the matter afterwards – smoke and ashes – were stable in nature. The reason that he didn't ignite the clay of his pipe in the process was that the activation energy required was very high. So it would be difficult for him to 'persuade' the clay of his pipe to catch fire. He supposed if he set his will upon it for long enough, it might happen, but he hadn't cared to. It was a good pipe.

He'd once been able to persuade a small puddle to freeze on a warm summer day, but the water had fought his will, and the effect had lasted only as long as he concentrated, melting instantly as soon as he looked away. His gift reflected the Creator's will, and His implicit laws of nature. And the Creator's intent, His cosmic Yes, did not brook being gainsaid by the Dragon Reborn any more than it did for the Dark One. After all, why would one want to burn the clay of his best pipe? Just because a man's mind could compass a thing, it didn't mean such a thing _should_ be done.

Rand counselled himself patience. After all, his captors didn't plan on hurting him just yet, and they were taking him where he wanted to go. On his own, his chances of getting there were negligible. Escape could wait. Besides, it wasn't as if the _damane_ Moghedein was going anywhere, was it?


	14. Chapter 14: Darkbox

**Chapter 14: Darkbox**

Moghedien strode through the corridors of the Tarasin Palace, looking neither right nor left. Back straight, head high, like a queen. The East Wing, where the _sul'dam_ and their charges were stationed was formerly the servant's quarters of the palace, attested to by the functionality of the furnishings and fittings. The walls were plastered a uniform matt white, the lighting coming from oil-lamps set into the wall, the glass of their housing tinted with smoke, their brass fittings plain but bearing the gleam of assiduous daily polishing. The East Wing was sparsely-occupied – there were a hundred or so _damane_ stationed here, and roughly half as many _sul'dam._

Most of the people the Spider passed in the halls were scurrying _da'covale,_ who stopped instantly as she swept by, falling to their knees and pressing their foreheads to the tiled floor. Moghedien did not deign to cast her eyes upon them. Doing so, she knew, would lead to them asking how they might serve the High Lady.

She passed _sul'dam_ too. Darkness, but the first time she'd nearly run into one bodily, and it had required every iota of composure she possessed not to throw herself to her knees, admit what she had done and beg for mercy. _That_ was what these vermin had done to her!

Instead, she had drawn herself up to her full height with a prideful glower. "You would impede _me_?" she snarled, as if she held a weave of lightning ready to hurl. "You would dare, little _sul'dam_?" The woman had lowered her eyes. In fact, she had prostrated herself as fully as the Property did. "Better." Moghedien acknowledged, then dismissed her from notice. _Easy._

Her confidence grew, despite the uncomfortable fit of her clothing, as she stalked through the halls. Her only plan at present was to make good upon her escape. Leave the Tarasin Palace and all memory of her bondage behind. The long nails of her left hand scratched the plaster as she turned the corner. _Careful._ That kind of mistake could give her away, show she was not used to bearing the trappings of the Blood. The _cour'souvra_ nestled snugly between her breasts on its silver chain, a hard gem that bore her whole heart. The silver and jet of the _a'dam_ around her throat.

The hall she swept through was broad, the floor tessalated with black and white rhombi, bordered with a strip of crimson tiling. Now, it was her turn to make a knee. It was the young Prince, Uthair. He looked small, scholarly, almost beneath notice for all his exalted rank. Moghedien, who had often cultivated such an appearance saw him for precisely what he was. In the Blight, there was an insect called a Stick. It looked like an innocuous twig upon a dry bush. Unless you disturbed it. Its bite was death. That was what this young man was. Instant death beneath your hand.

Heart hammering, the Spider bowed deeply. The young General swept past her without a second glance, face withdrawn, introspective, flanked by a curious-looking quartet. A distraught-looking Saldean _damane_ , her ageless Aes Sedai countenance frosted marchpane, a motherly-looking _sul'dam_ and what was – unless Moghedien missed her mark – a Warder, a colossal man who radiated sheer physical power, with a wooden sword girt at his hip instead of steel. And an angry-looking girl, scrawny, but the sword at her side looked like it belonged there too. _Curious._

* * *

Rand and the Band had made it to the Mol Hara without further incident, leading a charmed life. Here a tremendous battle raged on the flags of the square, fifty Deathwatch Guards and two Ogier Gardeners against two hundred Fists of Heaven and a hundred _lopar._ It was an even fight, a diamond-hard wedge of sable cleaving like an obsidian blade into the lightly-armoured Fists of Heaven, who fought back with javelins, short swords and throwing knives.

The _lopar_ waded into the fray, the raptor-like beasts spurred like fighting-cocks. Rand saw a Deathwatch Guard kicked up into the air by one raking blow of a _lopar's_ hind legs to land head-first on the cobbles. The man's _cuendillar_ armour was unharmed, but the soldier himself lay still, his neck broken.

The twin Ogier stood back to back against the _lopar,_ a gargantuan axe in either hand, the creascent-shaped axe blades mounted upon long hafts of sung wood. The Gardeners weren't just big and strong, they struck like a blacklance, as the heaps of cloven bodies about them attested.

A _lopar_ leapt dizzyingly high in the air, pushing off with his immensely strong rear legs, the height of a man and more above the ground, hurling himself at the Ogier in a dazzling display of power and grace. The Gardener clove him in two at the waist. Seizing the opportunity, another hurled himself at the Ogier, jaws snapping low at the Ogier's legs. The Gardener's right-hand axe hewed downwards through the _lopar's_ head. But his partner was in trouble, one _lopar_ hanging onto his forearm like a mastiff while he attempted to fend off two others with a single blade.

Both sides had _damane_. The defenders had two and the attackers three. Their battle was being fought in silence, blades of Spirit trying to sever their opponent's connection to _saidar._ To an onlooker who couldn't see the weaves, it appeared like five women staring angrily at one another. Ten, if you counted the _sul'dam._

With a clatter, a _raken_ swept in to land heavily upon the pitched roof overlooking the square, talons punching through the clay tiles as the flying lizard flapped its leathery wings for balance. It slid precipitously down the roof, scattering tiles until the raptor found purchase a yard from the lead guttering. Its long neck leaned out hungrily over the edge, eyes glittering as it hissed at the fighting men.

Rand counted six men on its back excepting the pilot, and they disembarked adroitly, lithe figures light on their feet taking up post on the rooftop. To his surprise, instead of bows or other projectile weapons, they bore the long-barrelled muskets he had seen in his vision when confronting the Dark One. Placing the walnut stocks to their shoulders, they took careful aim, coolly unleashing a steady fire upon the Deathwatch Guard and Ogier, to little apparent effect, their _cuendillar_ armour bullet-proof. Six men? No, he had been mistaken. There were only five.

All of a sudden, a few moments later, one of the defender's _damane_ fell, a look of shock upon her face. It hadn't been caused by the One Power. Her throat had been expertly slit from ear-to-ear, blood pumping from the gash. But there had been nobody within a dozen paces.

 _Bloodknives._ Assassins that wore a _ter'angreal_ that hid them with the weave Night's Shade as well as boosting their speed and skill. The _damane's_ partner went down quickly, overwhelmed by the three enemy channellers she faced, and the victors turned their wrath on the Deathwatch Guard and Ogier, broiling them within their armour with a wall of Fire. Charring them where they stood. One of the Ogier fought on a while longer, before being dragged down under a heap of slavering _lopar_.

One of the attacker's _damane_ turned her ire upon the Band, and full battle was joined between the Band's _damane_ and two of the attacker's. It was time for Rand to take advantage of the opportunity afforded him to escape his captors. He focused, and the _ta'veren_ gift bought him the slack to slip his bonds, ropes growing loose around his bound wrists and he worked his hands free.

Rand caught both his guards unawares, downing the man to his left with a compact right hook, before turning on the other, who had a drawn sword in his hand. _Catching the Salmon._ He placed the palms of his hands against the flat sides of the blade and twisted the sword out of his opponent's hands, hammering the pommel into the man's head to knock him cold before flipping the blade to leave him holding the hilt in both hands, ready.

Rand broke away, running hell-for-leather across the square, zigging and zagging. There was no pursuit from the Band, who had all they could handle merely staying alive. He wished them luck, but his business was elsewhere. He ducked into the doorway of the palace, skidding as his wet feet slipped on the polished wood, haring into the halls. Servants shouted their outrage at him, veiled _da'covale_ and moustachioed Ebou Dari alike, but he ignored them as he raced towards his quarry, an arrow loosed from the bow.

He turned a corner at full-tilt, and found himself face-to-face with Moghedien.

It was hard to say who was the more surprised as he skidded to a halt.

* * *

"Moghedien" Rand snarled.

The Forsaken looked at him apprehensively, licking her lips. Eyes scanning for avenues of possible escape. "Moridin. I thought you slain."

Rand's eyes fell upon the stone she bore around her neck. "Give me that _cour'souvra_ " he snapped in a voice cold as winter.

Abruptly, the Spider laughed. "You aren't him, are you? He gave me it back, why would he want it again? Who are you, then?" she demanded. Recognition dawned on her. "Al'Thor!"

"Doesn't matter who I am. Give me the damned thing."

She saw the matching stone hanging around his own neck, and the light of understanding was in her eyes. She might be evil, but she was far from stupid. "I think not. If you took Moridin's body, found his things, and he had another _cour'souvra,_ the one he gave me might not be mine. Whose is it, then?"

"Enough talking, Forsaken. Hand it over. Or I'll stop your heart and take it."

"Then why haven't you? It belongs to somebody you care about, doesn't it?" Moghedien jeered. She ripped the mindtrap from around her neck. There was only one way she could know for sure. Drawing a deep breath, she pressed into the crystalline flesh, anticipating a jolt of excruciating pain. No pain, just a backwash of sensations. There was elation and relief both in her cagy eyes. "I felt her, Al'Thor. That straw-haired chit, Elayne."

Rand stepped forward, his mind a tumult of anger and fear.

"Not a step closer, or I'll end her!" Moghedien snarled. "You _know_ I will. Put away your blade or I'll do it now."

A coldness came over Rand then, an emptiness like the _ko'di_ , the cold of a Borderland winter as he tucked his bare sword into his leather belt, where it hung awkwardly. "Want to wager that I hold your mindtrap right here?" he spoke in a voice like the grinding of ice. "I will trap you in a comatose body if you harm Elayne." he vowed grimly.

The Forsaken flinched first. "Very well. I suggest we exchange the mindtraps, and go our separate ways."

Rand nodded slowly. Elayne's safety was paramount. "No tricks, Moghedien. Or your very soul will rue it."

A careful arm's length apart, Rand watched the treacherous waters of her eyes as they each passed the stones into the other's hand, Rand snatching Elayne's to his breast with a ragged sigh of relief. It was then the Forsaken struck, a straight-razor in her open palm whickering for his throat.

Almost contemptuously, Rand slapped the weapon from her hand. With a frown, he laid his hand on the hilt of his blade, ready to end the Spider's overlong life. The flicker of surprise in her eyes was the only warning he had, the reflection of movement in her eyes. It was barely enough.

He spun, falling into River of Light, drawing and cutting low in the same fluid motion. Steel grated against steel, his stroke intercepting an opponent's incoming blade. His eyes couldn't even distinguish his opponent's form, just a guttering shadow dragging against the backdrop of the darkened hall that his eyes couldn't track. No Grey Man, this. Bloodknives were infinitely more dangerous.

Rand desperately blocked an attack he could barely see with Rain in High Wind, nearly missing his parry, blade clattering off his adversary's barely in time. The man moved like a black eel. In the brief duration of their struggle, Rand had determined the assassin carried two short blades by his forms. One touch of those long daggers, the barest scratch, and he'd be dead. The blades were poisoned.

His opponent was a wraith, a ghost. His speed unreal. Mesmerizing. Rand blocked a combination flurry from his adversary by instinct more than intent, the assassin's razor-keen knife shaving a sliver of the sleeve from his tunic like the peel from an apple. Any closer and the fight would have been over then and there.

Rand leveraged the advantage of his longer blade for all he was worth, striking out with Apple Blossoms In the Wind, a form usually used against multiple opponents, his blade finding empty air with all three cuts as the assassin nimbly jumped back. Desperation.

A whisper of sound was enough, and Rand ducked the thrown blade easily, the blade visible as soon as it left the man's hand. _Mistake._ He darted forward, hearing the telltale scrape of the Bloodknife drawing another blade and threw himself into Hummingbird Kisses the Honeyrose, hoping the momentary lapse in his enemy's concentration would give him an opening. Felt the familiar resistance of the long blade plunging home into the man's breast.

With his death, the assassin became visible. Rand began Folding the Fan to sheathe his sword, frowning when he remembered he wore no scabbard, and took stock of his surroundings hastily. Moghedien had seized the opportunity and fled, making good her escape. A pity, but he had accomplished what he had set out to do. He had secured Elayne's mindtrap.

He bent quickly to the fallen Bloodknife. It was a shock to discover his assailant was a woman, with a pageboy's haircut and a snub nose. She didn't look like a killer. Her large liquid blue eyes bore sadness and surprise and Rand couldn't endure their gaze.

He closed them, on impulse taking the _ter'angreal_ ring from her finger, feeling the still-warm weight of her small hand in his as he did so, taking care not to prick himself on the thorn. If he did, then like the young woman he had killed, his life would be measured in hours, his blood activating the device. He placed the ring in his valise. Elayne's _cour'souvra_ around his neck, over his heart.

* * *

There was the doorway to the courtyard, and freedom beckoned for Moghedien. The freedom she had longed for, striven for, believed beyond hope, now within her grasp.

A solitary figure stood between her and it, upon the threshold, a slim figure in the high-collared garb of a _sul'dam_. Milk-white skin, a heart-shaped face that would have been beautiful were it not for the inalienable stamp of cruelty upon it. Honey-hued hair falling in a multitude of stringlike braids. Instead of deferentially bowing and standing aside, the woman was advancing upon her, a smirk upon her face. This close, she could see the glow surrounding the other woman, signifying that she held the Power.

Liandrin.

A woman she had scorned, mocked, punished for her presumption in challenging the Chosen. A woman she given to Daved Hanlon for his gratification. A woman whom she had forced into obedience with Compulsion. An acolyte of the Black Ajah. Liandrin bowed her head, ironically, crooked a finger. "Don't trouble to speak, 'High Lady'. Follow me."

Liandrin pulled a key from her purse, opening a door to Moghedien's left, tantalisingly close to the exit to the palace. The room inside was bare, the air stale. Moghedien obediently entered, like a sheep to the slaughter. Liandrin shut the door behind them, locking it with brisk efficiency, before rounding upon her.

Liandrin's palm lashed her face, leaving her cheek stinging. There was fury on that foxlike face. "Oh, Moghedien, I have _dreamed_ of this day. You do have no idea how long I have waited for it. You can have no notion how belittling it felt, scraping and serving you, because your strength in the Power was so great and mine so inconsequential.

How do it feel now? Knowing that you have all that strength and yet you cannot even touch the One Power with the leash about your neck. And here I am. Weak little Liandrin. I could pluck you like a goose with _saidar_ and there wouldn't be a thing you could do to defend yourself." Liandrin's voice in her anger was strident, losing the veneer of culture and sophistication she assumed, reverting to the argot of the Tarabon streets.

Moghedien sneered at her. She might be terrified, and completely in the other woman's power, but she would sooner be in the Can Breat than acknowledge the fact. "Do what you must, _sorda_. But for the Great Lord's sake, just shut your peasant's mouth while you do. I weary of the sound of your voice."

Liandrin reached into her purse, pulling out a small black cube, so black it seemed more than the mere absence of colour. Her sepia-coloured eyes flickered from Moghedien to the cube, then back again. "Unfortunately, Moghedien, our Master has spoken to me, and he still has a use for you. This cube is a _ter'angreal_ of a unique type. It is called a Darkbox."

Moghedien's eyes widened. It was another creation by the great craftsman Aginor. Its function was to allow the person who used it to hear the Lord of the Dark's voice, no matter where they happened to be. At the time, Aginor had been derided for his creation by the other Chosen, since the Great Lord had always been able to talk to his Chosen freely, until now.

When the Dragon pent him up, the Lord of the Grave was banished from the sphere of this world. But with this device, a person could still hear his voice. Now Moghedien understood why the Great Lord had always favoured that madman above all others, spent so much energy suborning him, seducing him. The Inventor had been imbued with the divine spark of the Adversary. It had been a great coup when Aginor had pledged to the Great Lord of the Dark.

The Darkbox operated using a principle called 'quantum entanglement'. The stuff of the Dark Box was here but it resonated like the string of a giant harp. The other end of the infinite string lay in the dark ether of the Great Lord's being, in a nested universe contained within their own. Truly, if you could really use the Darkbox as Liandrin claimed, it was nothing short of a miracle.

Liandrin's fidgety, clever hands caressed the slick surface of the cube. "But why should I presume to speak for our Master when he has the means to speak for himself.?" Liandrin had recovered her composure, her voice inflected with its usual bored drawl. The Darkfriend caressed the glossy contours of the Darkbox familiarly. But it was not Moghedien that _Shai'tan_ addressed, but Liandrin.

LIANDRIN, RELEASE MOGHEDIEN FROM THE _A'DAM_. THEN GIVE HER THE DARKBOX

Liandrin hesitated palpably, her reluctance evident as she placed a long-nailed finger upon the _a'dam_ just so, and the clasp unfastened smoothly, the bracelet coming away. Moghedien ripped the device from her throat and threw it away with a shudder of disgust. Opened herself to the Source, drinking deep, drawing her Power to her, as much as she could hold.

Liandrin cowered before her, trembling, pressing the Darkbox into her hands before falling at her feet. To the Darkfriend, holding this much _saidar,_ Moghedien must have shone like the sun.

Remembering she was in a place of great peril, Moghedien concentrated, masking her ability while still being full to bursting, a reservoir of life and death. Ignoring Liandrin, she laid her fingers upon the device, much as the other woman had done. A torrent of sensations poured into her, suffused her along with the words it uttered to her.

MOGHEDIEN, YOU MUST TRAVEL FROM HERE TO THE LOCATION OF THE NEAREST PORTAL STONE. ONCE YOU ARE THERE, ACTIVATE THIS DEVICE AGAIN AND I WILL INSTRUCT YOU FURTHER

Moghedien's mouth was dry with fear and awe. "At once, Great Lord. What do you wish me to do with this woman?"

WHATEVER YOU WISH. I HAVE NO FURTHER USE FOR HER.

She half-expected Liandrin to try and seize the Source, to fight her, as futile as that might be, but instead she begged and grovelled. Evidently, she had taught Liandrin better in their previous encounters. Icily, Moghedien struck out at her with an inverted web with all the considerable force of her will behind it. Compulsion.

Liandrin looked up, fear transformed to awe and adoration. _Much better._ "Little Liandrin" she sighed, almost gently. "What I require of you is to run to the nearest _sul'dam_ and tell her that you are _marath'damane_ and need to be immediately leashed.

You will be a good little _damane_ for the rest of your life, always hoping that you will somehow break free but never being able to. Because, little Liandrin, it is not just power that separates you and I. I have the Great Lord's favour. I am _Nae'blis_ , and you are an insignificant cockroach."

Moghedien stroked the Taraboner's hair, almost tenderly, reminiscently. Liandrin's tresses were as soft as they looked. "I wish you a long and productive life of service. Now I must leave you."

And with that, the Chosen abandoned her there.


	15. Chapter 15: Miru

**Chapter 15: Miru**

The weave of Healing tore through Mat's body, an angry torrent ripping him from the comfortable womb of innocent darkness. The breath was expelled from his lungs with a grunt, his body sunfishing, muscles clenching in pain and release as the cleansing weave drowned his senses, every hair on his body standing on end as his eyes jolted wide open.

His consciousness was overloaded as every synapse fired simultaneously in a burst of random static. Memory returned in a card-shuffle of impressions, rebus-like images. He recalled a pair of eyes glaring at him accusingly as the light faded from them and the first, terrible thought arriving with that image was that it was Uthair that lay dead at his hand.

But that was just his shame inflecting the image, Mat realised as logic reasserted itself, the churning of his subconscious. Uthair's eyes were hazel, like Tuon's. These eyes had been the faded blue of the background of Hawkwing's standard. The rest of the memory returned, and he saw Jearom falling to his spear.

He was in the bed he and Tuon shared in Ebou Dar. Both of them were naked, her soft curvaceous form wrapped protectively around his, her head pressed against his chest. As he roused, she slipped one brown bare leg drowsily over his hip.

So abruptly awakened, Mat found the intimacy jarring, and gently fended her off. Rebuffed, she rolled away and sat up in the bed. The angles of her knees and elbows and the set of her jaw showed tension. Had he upset her? Of course he bloody well had.

Mat looked down at his left arm, saw the patch of new white skin, piebald against his tan, where the Blademaster's sword had half-severed his arm. He flexed his biceps tentatively. Good as new.

And froze. _The bloody Power...! Where is my goatkissing medallion!_

A furtive glance to his left assuaged his flustered panic. By his bedside, on the mahogany dressing-table, the foxhead pendant on its leather thong lay, just out of arm's reach. Clearly, it had been taken off by whoever had Healed him. He'd put it on in a moment. Just as soon as he felt like getting up. Mat yawned cavernously. There were newborn kittens with more vigour than Abell Cauthon's eldest son possessed at the present moment, that was the truth of it.

Mat's stomach groaned ominously. He'd get up soon enough. And eat something. A _lot_ of something. Felt like he'd swallowed a weasel. A brace of the untrustworthy, long-tailed vermin... !

 _Pie_ , Mat decided firmly. You couldn't beat a bloody big pie. Flaky pastry, filled with tender beef, onions and lashings of gravy. Proper Two Rivers fare. Nothing fancy. That would set him to rights.

They were not alone in the room. Outside the translucent paper hangings which provided the bed-curtains, an irritated Mat could clearly see the room was full of people. No doubt gawking and getting an eyeful of his goodwife's rear end, whatever these shifty Seanchan claimed about observing _sei'taer_. Not to mention his own sweet rump!

Tuon was oblivious, of course. Seanchan Blood had different etiquette in their private quarters, and would blithely go about nude in front of their retinue and their _da'covale._ After twenty years, it wasn't getting any more comfortable for him. "My dear," Mat grumped. "I'm stark bollock naked in here. Would you mind exercising some of your omnipotence and telling these worthy people to kindly bugger off. At least until I find some clothing? It's like a bloody Aiel sweat tent in here."

There was a long pause before Tuon deigned to reply, her voice cool. "I'm afraid not, Knotai. We have a situation and the palace is in lockdown. You know the protocol."

Mat swore, and sat up, disregarding his nudity. "What kind of situation?"

"The city is under attack. The reports are confusing and contradictory. The attackers took out the Deathwatch Barracks and the House of Truth, our intelligence hub, in their first assault so they know where to hit us and hurt us, and now we're fighting blind. They have channellers, maybe _damane_ , and _raken_ which suggests some rebel element among the Seanchan.

There are loyalists fighting on our behalf, but as you might imagine, none of them likely have any better idea of what is going on than we do. But the Palace, at least, is secure, and we have fended off a heavy assault by elements of an elite infantry unit augmented with _lopar_. Our perimeter is hardened, the Deathwatch Guards in the palace are mobilised and every one of our hundred _damane_ stand ready to repel further assaults."

"Blood and _flaming_ ashes! That's all very well Tuon, unless the enemy are already in here with us!"

Tuon sighed. "This is the safest place in the Palace. There are Deathwatch Guard posted outside the door, and this section of the palace is trip-warded against Gateways. The doors are locked, so no Grey Man or Bloodknife can gain access to this room. And if anything breaches this door, they will still have to get through the people in this chamber to get to us. You know the protocols as well as I do. Light, you had a hand in designing them."

"I know that, Tuon. But if our attackers know us so well, then it stands to reason they will have a plan to get at you here… I'm talking out loud, trying to think what I would do. Bloodknives to infiltrate, to kill the _damane_ maintaining the trip-wards and open the palace for Travelling…? I need to get out of here. Get a feeling for the battle, how to respond, coordinate our defence."

Tuon shook her head. "Nobody goes in or out of this room."

Mat sat up in bed, brain churning. Light, but he felt slow, logy. Unprepared. _Concentrate, Mat. What are you missing?_ Something felt very wrong, like an itch he couldn't scratch. "Right. Fine." _Assess your resources. Begin with what you have in this room._

At the side of the bed was the _damane_ and _sul'dam_ who had healed him. A brawny sandy-haired warrior, who stood with them in a knot of three at the foot of the bed. His eye was drawn to an unexpected figure standing behind them. His estranged son, Uthair, who was scowling at him as per usual. He hadn't realised his boy was in Ebou Dar, but he was relieved he was safe at least and not caught up in the chaos outside.

There was a short and scrappy woman with them, blonde hair short and defiantly unkempt framing a delicate face marked with an aquiline nose that had been broken and reset well but not perfectly. It took Mat a while to place her. Beca Koukal. Beca Surehand some called her. The girl Uthair had raised to the Blood at the Battle of Nadin Gap. The short sword on her hip bore no heron-mark. It was a plain, serviceable blade. Standard light-infantry issue from the Empire's forges. Yet the woman who bore it was better than some Blademasters Mat had known. She reminded him of Brigitte Silverbow a little. She never shut up, incorrigibly mocked everything, and assiduously chased every pretty man in sight when she was off duty.

She barely seemed the same woman, today. Her knuckles were white, her face a blank like a pantomime mask. Mat recognised the signs of a warrior using the Flame and the Void, the _ko'di,_ to prepare for battle. Mat gave her an approving nod. He was glad she was ready for anything. Somebody needed to be.

On the other side of the bed, nearest Tuon, stood Tuon's _so'jhin_ , Alcea, a statuesque woman over six feet tall with a remarkable bosom. Outwardly, she was the perfect handservant – beautiful, demure and cultured.

Yet Mat knew what few others did. Concealed in the immaculate lace ruffs of her sleeves, strapped to those glorious thighs, hidden at her ample waist, was a collection of knives that would have been the envy of Thom Merrilyn. Truth to tell, he didn't know how she stood up under the weight of all the metal she was carrying.

Alcia's real function – like her mother Selucia before her – was Tuon's personal bodyguard, her last line of defence. This flower of womanhood was as doughty as any Aiel Maiden, and her loyalty was unquestioned. If Tuon died, even from natural causes, she would take her own life.

 _Wrong._ Everything about this picture was wrong. That nagging sixth sense in the back of his mind that was the combined intuition of a hundred generations of people trying very hard not to get killed.

Mat forced an avuncular smile for all the people in the room. Alcea gurned at him, which was at least normal for her. Beca gave a poor impression of a grin in return, her expression that of someone who had taken a bite of some delectable-looking fruit and found it spoiled. The tension in the air was palpable.

For some reason he couldn't stop thinking about Stones. An odd echo of what he'd been doing before the duel? He turned back to Tuon, essaying ease. "Tell me more of the attacks."

"The enemy is everywhere before we are. He seems to spread himself thin and then when we test him, he shows hidden strength. The city is broken and our forces are isolated pockets of resistance, even here. Why ask me, Knotai?" Tuon replied. "I am no general."

 _He's gaming me,_ Mat thought. _Playing it as if it is a Stones board._ What began the attack? _Moyo moyō._ Corner, corner, centre. Play to overload the board, establish the basis for holding down territory. Then _sente._ Keep the enemy reacting, always a stone behind. Aggressively switching play. Give the defender no rhythm. Then what?

 _Not what, but who. You can't play Stones. Not at this level. Play the player, not the board. Who am I fighting?_ He looked back at the room, addressing Uthair. He was after Mat the most capable leader in the room. "Son, pass my commands to the Deathwatch Guards outside the door. We're fighting blind.

We don't have _raken_ so let's make do. Designate _damane_ inside the Palace but outside the warding to open Spygates above the battlefield, partitioning the battlefield into a grid. I want our forces located and mapped, flashpoints and known enemy forces marked.

The next order of business is to contact our forces in the City. Open gateways just large enough to talk through so we can communicate, but I don't want anything bigger than that for now."

Uthair nodded, almost distractedly, folding his arms behind his back neatly and walking to the door, where he began to talk hurriedly with the soldiers outside. Mat roused himself. "Pass me that map, and my stones" he chivvied Tuon. "I'll also need some markers for sites of fighting. Get me some coins or something." He was missing something vital. He _knew_ it.

He looked back at the room. Uthair at the door. Alcea staring at the two channelers and the two warriors across the bed. If they were cats, they would all have their hackles raised. The dice started up rattling in his head and he stifled a groan. _Burn me._ That was just about the worst sign there was that something bad was going to happen.

 _Stones._ Sometimes the way to strike was to rest an innocuous stone right up against an apparent strong point, an eye. _Miru._ A test, and a challenge. A hard-pressed opponent would ignore it and turn his attention elsewhere. And then the attacker would bide his time before audaciously assaulting the enemy where he felt most secure.

It was wrong. All so terribly wrong! What was the Warder- _damane_ - _sul'dam_ trio from the debacle in the Square doing here? They had injured him – the Raven Prince. Spilt royal blood. They should be imprisoned or dead, surely! Together with his boy, they formed a quartet. Sizing him, Tuon and Alcea up like bloodhounds looking at a sleeping doe.

The pieces fell into place. That wasn't steel at Darryl Harlan's left hip, but a practice sword of wooden laths. Wooden sword to incapacitate or kill without drawing blood. A weapon to slay a High Lord or Lady, even an Empress.

The girl, Beca. She was Uthair's. He had made her. She owed him _everything._ And yet this sat ill with her. It was _guilt_ in her eyes, not fear that caused her to seek the solace of the emotionless Void.

Even Jearom had been Uthair's teacher of the sword. His son was the common factor. _Oh, Light._ It was his son who was the enemy. How could he have not seen it? The answer to that was easy. He had not seen it because he had not wanted to.

He forced himself to smile, to act nonchalant as his eye scoped the room. His _ashanderai_ leaning against the wall, against the dresser where his foxhead medallion lay, within reach. Harlan one long stride away from the spear, the _damane_ inching towards the medallion on the tabletop.

The dice stopped.

He stretched languorously, and turned his head towards his wife and Alcea, smiling lazily. His eyes did not hold a smile, just awful fear. "Tuon, dear?" he drawled.

"Yes, Knotai?" she replied, suddenly wary despite his caged-bird smile.

"RUNNNNNNN!" he yelled, pushing her off the bed towards Alcea, before hurling himself back in the opposite direction, fingers scrabbling for the foxhead medallion. Mat swept the _ter'angreal_ into his right palm, just beating the _damane_ to the prize, and not a second too late as he felt the medallion grow chilly against his palm, the flows of Air she sought to bind him with melting away as soon as they touched him.

Mat twisted, throwing an awkward left cross that missed its target. He'd been aiming to render the woman senseless, but the blow only grazed her temple, drawing a furious yelp. She reeled backwards, stumbling into her Warder, who grabbed her and hauled her behind the bulwark of his body in the same movement. Mat took advantage of the opportunity, diving towards the _ashanderei._

It wasn't even close. The wood of the blademaster's _shinai_ caught him an agonising blow in the chest. Arc of the Moon. The River Undercuts the Bank chopped his legs out from under him, and instead of taking his head off with the practice sword, Harlan simply stepped inside, driving him into the wall with the wedge of his shoulder, hard enough to crack the plaster and break a rib, driving the air from his lungs.

Mat collapsed. He was still conscious, a helpless spectator. Tuon was shrieking like a firebell, calling for aid. Alcia and Beca were going at it hammer and tongs. There was a cut on the swordswoman'scheek while Alcia's thigh was badly gashed, the knifewoman favouring her other leg.

As Mat watched horrified, the bedsheet flicked out, seemingly imbued with a life of its own, cracking like a whip as it coiled about Tuon, binding her legs together. She tripped and fell on her face with a squark. A gag of Air rudely silenced the Empress. There was bloody murder etched on Tuon's face. Indignation at being so manhandled by a _damane._

All of a sudden, a tiny fireball, no bigger than a candle's flame, shot from Tuon's wildly gesticulating hands, and the _damane's_ livery caught fire. It was the Leashed One's turn to shriek, beating at herself with her hands before more efficiently extinguishing the fire with a blanket of solid Air. Tuon just sat numbly, staring at her hand in shock as if it belonged to someone else, as the _damane_ slammed a shield of Spirit between the Empress and _saidar._

Meanwhile, the Warder moved smoothly to flank Alcia. There was no mercy shown by either the _Gaidin_ or the swordswoman as they both attacked her simultaneously. Harlan took full advantage of her hobbling movement, The Viper Flicks its Tongue scoring a partial hit, breaking through Alcia's defences, driving the blunt end of the wooden sword into Alcia's shoulder, staggering her.

At the same time, Beca Surehand rammed her steel up through the bodyguard's ribcage, spearing her heart. Throughout it all, Uthair had watched impassively, hands clasped behind his back, face as hard as stone.

Mat had made it to his knees, trying to force his unwilling body to obey him. The _ashanderai_ lay on the floor, two paces away. He went for it. Harlan kicked it away, and cuffed him to the ground with a work-hardened fist. "Stay down." The room dipped, yawed, swam out of focus. Darkness.


	16. Chapter 16: Judgement

**Chapter 16: Judgement**

Mat came to grudgingly. His head ached. Hands tied behind his back. He tested the bonds experimentally. They were secure. He was on his knees, ankles hogtied together. He wasn't going anywhere any time soon. Not of his own volition, anyway.

Tuon was beside him, her face as distant as the dark side of the moon. Mat knew why. It wasn't the prospect of torture, or imminent death. It wasn't even her son's betrayal. It was that she'd channelled. Tapped the One Power. To her, that made her something far less than human.

"Tuon, love, stay with me" Mat whispered to her, fiercely. "This changes _nothing_ , hear me? You're still you. I still love you. Light, my sister Bode is an Aes Sedai, and she's turned out alright. For a Cauthon, anyway." Tuon gave no indication that she'd heard a word. _What would it be like to touch the Source?_ Mat thought furtively. The thought horrified him, if he was honest with himself. Especially now he knew that his sister could channel, seen the sheer number of Two Rivers men that had the ability, that joined the _Asha'man_.

 _The savour. It has been long._

What was it that Mazrim Taim had said of Emond's Field? _I picked that blackberry bush myself, and it was small and thorny, but bore a surprising number of fruit._ The old blood of Manetheren, the bramble in the Dark One's hand. Well, he was no blackberry, but he was _all_ bloody thorn. Just ask Demandred.

The Saldean _damane_ marked Tuon, and he could tell by her fixed expression that she was holding a shield over his wife with everything she had, just in case. Flanking her and the _sul'dam_ were the two warriors, their expressions set and hard. Whatever their reservations, they had committed to this course, and there was no going back.

Mat fixed Harlan and Beca with a hard glare. _Your time will come,_ he vowed.

Beside them stood his son.

Mat took a deep breath. "Abell.."

The boy glared right back at him. "My name is _Uthair._ "

"Yes, you're right. I named you after my da. A good man who bred horses, who liked to fish and smoke his pipe. You chose to take the name of a man who took a throne from his uncle by treachery, and held onto it by unleashing a pair of half-mad _Tsorov'ande Doon_ on those he saw as his foes. Light, boy, one of them was so far gone he had the rotting sickness, but Uthair didn't care. One of them ran amok and killed him in the end. A cautionary tale.

Your name, your choice. I just thought you were trying to shock me. A boy's pride. But whydo _this_? I know we haven't always seen eye to eye. My da and me the same. But you're still my lad. No matter what you've done."

"That's not what you said at Nadin's Gap." Uthair retorted.

"You know I didn't mean it. I have told you many times since. I would I had never hit you. It was unforgivable. But after what I saw... I reacted. Loial would have told me not to put a long handle on my axe, but he wasn't there. All those dead, and then all the frustration that I have a son I don't understand, a stranger. A Seanchan. A serious minded young man who doesn't chase girls, doesn't go helling, who spends all his time with tutors and training-masters... Light damn my soul, it's my fault. I was never cut out to be a father.

Mebbe it's too late for you and me now, but you need to buck up, Uthair, and listen to me before it's too late. I can't make this go away – Light, boy, you've killed Alcia! – but if you give it up now, I think I can get you out of here with a whole skin.

I'm pretty sure I can talk your mother into letting you slip away – you know as well as I that if you stay they'll hang you to rot in Imfaral. I'll come with you. Maybe we'll go to the Two Rivers. Build you a house. Put down some roots. It's a good life there. Or maybe travel if you'd prefer that. I was footloose at your age, too."

"You feed me honey after gall, _Father._ " Uthair spat."You failed me. You will fail me again. As for Mother, she never gave me a second thought. No, come to think it over, that misses the mark. She did consider, and decided to treat me as a potential enemy and not a son from the very start. I was raised by wet-nurses, then governesses and tutors, then soldiers and scholars. If you mislike how Seanchan I am, then that is the cause. I am a ward of the Empire. I have neither father nor mother. I am a sword. An arrow loosed from the bow."

Mat heaved a sigh. "There is some truth in what you say, and I'll not gainsay it. But it is a twisted truth. It is this damned place, up on the heights, on the shale, clinging to the edge of the precipice... I should have taken you both out of here, but Tuon wouldn't abandon her people, her duty. But you must know Tuon loves you. _Dearly._... You are the only child she will ever have. Min Foretold it. Son or daughter, your mother loves you.

What she did... what _we_ did was the best we could to protect you in this nest of snakes. Had she shown you favour, it would have been a death sentence for you. Raising you as her child would have been a political statement making you de-facto heir-apparent. It would have united every single one of her rivals against her. The Reclamation would have failed, we would be dead – you, me and Tuon – and the Empire would burn like a funeral pyre.

The law was never changed, you know. Upon the death of the Emperor or Empress, succession passes to the eldest _heir_ , male or female. Ever wonder why no male claimant in a thousand years succeeded to the throne, son? The Empress usually arranges to stack the deck. If the eldest child is a boy, she has them quietly disposed of.

You want proof your mother loves you? _You're still here._ She found a way to keep you alive. By grooming you for the military, ensuring that you'd be surrounded at all times by soldiers fanatically loyal to you alone. Trust me, boy, I've been in a lot of tight places in my life, and it's a funny thing, but you're often safer on the battlefield than you are in the court.

You want to know something, Uthair? Our plan has always been that you follow Tuon to the Crystal Throne. From the moment of Min's Foretelling, if not before. Had your mother had a daughter, then instead of death, you would instead have gone into exile, and I with you, leaving the Seanchan Empire. Tuon would never permit her children to grow up to kill one another. Not after she passed through the same crucible herself with her siblings.

Your Mum has been through more than I can rightly compass, and somehow she's come out the other side with a soul mostly intact. The hardest thing she has ever done was giving you up. All the professors, the economists and battlefield strategists, Tylee, all of it... it was to equip you to rule in the hardest kingdom in the world. To survive and thrive, and ultimately to lead your people, to equip you to begin the changes that will truly emancipate this land while leaving it strong.

Our duty – mine and your mother's – was to drag the nation back from the precipice. Yours would be to shape it. The greatest man I ever knew was my friend, Rand al'Thor. The Dragon Reborn. It was our intention that you grow to be the greatest man since him.

If you want to punish someone, kill me, not Tuon, son. She wasn't free to be a mother. I was free to be your Dad. I'm the one who let you down. Failed you. Let her go."

Uthair's face was obdurate. "I have heard enough. I don't believe a word of it. Even if I did, it is too late." For a second, his face crumpled, and then firmed again with dark strength. "We are who we are, Father. A person is like a river running in a steep-sided valley, a saw cutting into a log of wood. Our every action deepens the groove. There can be no turning back.

Your every word and action convinces me that I have taken the correct course of action. For the longest time, Father, I sought to be as you are. Now I see you true. Your sentimentality appals me. It is an unforgivable quality in a leader of men. I have studied every battle the Band fought, and the Field of Merrilor. I pored over the maps, spoke to people who were there. Men say I am a great captain, and it is no empty flattery. But you are better than I will ever be. You see things I never could. Do things I would never conceive of.

Despite this, I took you so simply. First, I killed Min, so you would never see me coming. Do not fear, I assure you she did not suffer."

Mat felt sick. "You killed Min?..." His voice tailed off. This was a nightmare from which he desperately wanted to awaken. Mat closed his eyes, unable to block his ears to the horrors he was being forced to hear. _Oh, Min. May the Creator shelter you in the hollow of His hand._

So, the boy said she 'did not suffer?', did he? Callow, callous and ignorant as only the young could be. Min had endured plenty in her life. And now she had been betrayed to her death. It was beyond bearing.

The worst of it was that Mat could see the logic in a strategic sense, even though Min was a true innocent. The fact that he could even compass the idea filled him with shame, as did the knowledge he was trying to find a way of rationalising what his son had done, trying to find some mitigating reason that would exonerate Uthair. There was none. The torrent of words continued unabated. He could only sit and listen.

"Then, I got Jearom to taunt you into a contest, then try to kill you. The madman was only too willing. I _know_ the story of Galadedrid and Gawyn. Knew you couldn't resist the challenge. I knew you would probably find a way to survive anyway – you are _ta'veren_ , after all _._ But I successfully calculated that there was an excellent chance he would succeed in injuring you badly enough to need Healing.

How do you dispose of a _ta'veren_? _Huo yan._ The Moving Eye. Send him somewhere where he has no liberties, somewhere you have already prepared. Better yet, your injury caused the Empress to thoughtlessly rush to your side. Precisely where I wanted you both.

You needed Healing, which gave me the excuse to get my _damane_ next to you. Trigger the lockdown procedure by attacking Ebou Dar with the Winged Hammer. Then ensure I was swept up in the procedure as a member of the High Blood and bundled in here for my own safety along with my entourage by your Deathwatch Guards. Here we are, in the midst of your fortress, surrounded by your crack troops and a hundred _damane._ Why aren't they breaking down the door?"

"Your _damane._ " Mat replied heavily. "Inverted weave, set the moment she walked through the door. Nobody would even know she held _saidar._ Tied off so she was free to handle us. Nobody outside has a clue what's happening inside here, do they?"

"Precisely" Uthair confirmed. "The rest is just mathematics. A man with no weapon or unarmed combat training against a Warder armed with a wooden sword. Beca and I against the bodyguard. A fully-trained _damane_ against the hypothetical possibility that the Empress had some latent ability with the One Power. As it turned out, I did not even have to venture myself. The field of Asinbayar taught me that isn't always necessary. I accounted for everything."

"Not everything" Mat gnarred. "Not by half. How are you getting out of here, boy? We're inside the Gateway-blocking ward, so you can't Travel out of here."

"I had originally planned to render you all unconscious, and stow you, Mother and Alcia's body behind a screen of the One Power replicating the other half of the room. On the screen, I would display you and Tuon in bed, sitting up and talking, Alcia standing guard. That's why I needed this particular _damane._ The one you intended to use for Mother's nameday gift – yes, I knew about that too. It was the weakest facet of my plan, re-using that one.

Precisely five minutes from now, one of my Bloodknives will take down the _damane_ outside who is maintaining the Gateway ward. The alarm will be triggered and the Deathwatch will automatically check this room in case the Empress's safety was endangered. They'll take a look and see we're all fine. The Empress will tell them to leave, and they'll go – that will actually be my _damane_ 's voice, rendered through a filter of Air. As soon as they go, my _damane_ opens a Gateway, and we bolt. Straight to Seandar. Tricky, but far from impossible."

Uthair steepled his hands. "As it turns out, I won't even need to do that. My Mother has seen to that herself. My _sul'dam_ has a second leash. She will put it round my Mother's neck. Fortuona Athaem Devi Paendrag, Empress of Seanchan will be no more. In her place will be Tuon the _damane._ "

Tuon let out a keening cry of utter anguish, and started rocking, hugging her knees to her chest. Tears of shame poured down her cheeks, staining them muddy with her kohl makeup. Her son continued calmly as if she hadn't spoken. He didn't even glance in her direction.

"Not a person in the whole of Seanchan – save you, Father – will acknowledge her as Empress, not after they have seen her wearing the _a'dam._ I intend to display her in all the great cities of the Raven Empire, and send my emissaries to every kingdom amongst the Oathbreaker nations this side of the sea to declare the fact that she is _marath'damane._ Unfit to lead our people.

After that, I intended to have her stilled and executed, but I have heard your argument for clemency. Since there is no danger of her becoming a figurehead for rebellion as a _marath'damane,_ I am minded to grant your request. As a _damane,_ she can continue to serve the Empire.

The Empire needs stewardship and a smooth transition of power. Right here and now, I declare myself Emperor of Seanchan. In keeping with custom, I will take a new name. Henceforth, I shall be known as Mordred Uthair Paendrag, Second of His Name."

Mat raised his voice. "Son, I'm begging you. You _can't_ do that. For her, that would be a fate worse than death. Please, please, for the Light, please try and remember everything good you've ever known everything worth clinging onto and don't do this. Just let her go. The world is wide. Send her into exile. I'll go with her."

Mordred shook his head forbiddingly. "It cannot be so. Within the Raven Empire, she no longer poses a threat. But if she left the Seanchan Empire, then Andor or the White Tower could set her up as a figurehead, somebody they could use to legitimise a claim upon the Seanchan lands. I will not risk it. No, she stays within our borders, come what may. And here, she is subject to our law. She must be leashed."

Mat stared at him bleakly, bereft of hope, then looked at Tuon. In a trembling voice choked with tears he spoke once more. "Mordred, it would be kinder to kill her than that. Stilling. I beg it of you. If you ever loved me, or her, don't make her into a _damane._ "

Mordred's face might have been chipped from flint for all the emotion it conveyed. "Then let it be so. As for you, Father, I must also pronounce sentence. You are the man who once gave up half the light of the World to save the World. How far you have fallen since the sacrifices you made in those times. Your bathos has made you blind.

You are a soldier, First Rodholder and General of our Ever-Victorious Army. As such, I deem your wilful blindness no different in nature to a sentry falling asleep at his post. Both are a dereliction of duty caused by the conscious choice to indulge a weakness.

Therefore, I decree that you be blinded with the One Power – to ensure that royal blood is not spilt in the process – and that you are remanded in custody in the uttermost dungeon of the Towers of Midnight in Imfaral at my pleasure. After a period of grace is allowed you for contemplation and reflection, you will be taken thence to a place of execution where your heart will be stopped by the One Power."

Mat looked at Tuon, huddled on the floor, and back at Mordred, trying to see some trace of the son that he had loved. He looked searchingly into the Emperor's remote eyes.

Mat had once encountered a man, an _Asha'man_ , who had been Turned to the Shadow. What remained after the Myrddraal and Dreadlords had their way with him was.. different. Something that wore a man's face and body, even his emotions and mannerisms, like a cloak. Something _other_ , lurking in his eyes. Evil. Almost contemptuous. Like a good actor with a poor crowd, not quite needing his best to play the part. Almost flaunting the wrongness. This felt similar. Similar, but not the same.

"Oh, Light. He's got to you somehow hasn't he? The Dark One! The Father of Lies!" Mat shouted angrily, struggling with his bonds, trying to haul himself to his feet. "I know you're still in there, somewhere. Fight him, son! Take it from me, boy, he cozens and steals. You might get what he promises, but what good is any of it without remaining _true_? ..."

As fast as blinking, something passed across Mordred's face. Then the Emperor commanded the _Gaidin_. "I won't tolerate these filthy insinuations. Shut him up."

Harlan drew the _shinai_ and clouted Mat across the head in one choreographed move, at the last instant pulling the force of the blow so that he was rendered unconscious and not slain.


	17. Chapter 17: Combinatorics

**Chapter 17: Combinatorics**

Rand was trying to find something positive in his predicament.

The best he had come up with so far was this: _Well, you are certainly learning more about the Seanchan people._ This was indisputable. The merits of the cultural cross-pollination he had experienced thus far were of dubious value. Had he really thought he could simply walk into the Tarasin Palace, collect the _cour'souvra_ from Moghedien and stroll blithely out again unmolested?

His luck had run out spectacularly, _ta'veren_ or no, when he'd literally run into the embrace of a half-company of highly-agitated and belligerent Deathwatch Guards. Rand had still been trying to work out what to do when he'd been given the good news with the butt-end of a Seanchan spearstave. Down he went, and lights out. The Guards had – understandably – been rather keen to discover the identity of an unknown man carrying a sword who was wandering through the palace.

Rand's capacity for invention at short notice had failed him. He couldn't very well claim to be the Dragon Reborn after all, and the other possibilities were no better. So he kept silent. Things had only gotten worse from there. A Seeker for Truth had arrived, posthaste, and identified him as Moridin from the description. Before he could so much as blink, he was at the bottom of a pile of Deathwatch Guards once more as they enthusiastically clubbed him back into unconsciousness.

He'd awoke under guard – six _damane,_ half a dozen _sul'dam_ and twenty Deathwatch Guardsmen who stared at him much like a hungry owl sizing up a plump fieldmouse. The channellers looked baffled, angry – finding nothing to shield – and under their hauteur, more than a little afraid because of it. He could only imagine how nervous that made them, their imaginations running riot.

Rand had an idea that it wouldn't take much for one of the _sul'dam_ to take matters into her own hands and make the entirely reasonable assumption that the only good Forsaken was a dead Forsaken. So he kept silent, head bowed, staring at the floor.

Rand had spent his time in the holding cell learning the place. In a moment, if he concentrated, he could now exercise his _ta'veren_ gift and escape this cell to its analogue in _Tel'aran'rhiod._ All the _damane, sul'dam_ and Guardsmen in Ebou Dar couldn't stop him flying the coop.

Yet he couldn't leave. After the Seeker had identified him, they had taken Elayne's _cour'souvra_ , rightly assuming that it was a _ter'angreal_ of some kind. A sensible precaution. Before he'd been identified, he hadn't had sufficient time conscious and clear-headed enough to learn his cell well enough to abscond. Thankfully, he'd had the foresight to anticipate being relieved of the mind-trap and had acted accordingly to mitigate the situation.

As Lews Therin, he'd known the mindtrap's creator, Aginor, before the man had turned to the Shadow. Ishar Morad Chuain had been a brilliant man, utterly monomaniacal in his obsessive temper. Part of his nature was his mistaken belief that others shared his obsessions. Aginor had been obsessed by mathematics, especially number theory and combinatorics. According to him, the real world wasn't just measurable, quantifiable, but he believed if something was physically real, it had a mathematical basis for reality as well.

Lews Therin Telamon had held the scholar in a kind of diffident contempt. In fact, he had underestimated him, often to his cost. In contrast, the inventor had always sought Lews Therin's approval, had looked up to him. For some reason, one memory had stuck indelibly in his mind. And Rand al'Thor had been very fortunate that it was this particular memory.

 _Clad in a grubby smock, loosely belted at the waist, Ishar shuffled after Lews Therin, trying to keep up with the taller man's athletic stride. His face bore a week's beard, and with some distaste, the Dragon saw the sweat-patches under his arms. The academic was near Lews Therin's height, which was easy to overlook with his scrawny, angular frame and stooped carriage._

 _"...Take any physical system, no matter how complex. A rational person can clearly discern order amidst the chaos. Numbers, Lews Therin! A human brain is a network of millions of cells, arbitrarily connected by neurons that fire, transmitting bursts of information from one to another. And yet, I have found a pattern, order within the chaos!_

 _I mapped the brain of a common leech, which has but a few dozen brain cells. Its operation is a function of its symmetry. Lews Therin, just as an architect needs to understand the symmetry of regular polyhedra to build stable structures, so the Architect of all built everything from the same basic ingredients. Mathematical symmetry – of which geometric symmetry is but a foretaste. Representation theory, symmetry-breaking, abstract group-theory... Look here."_

 _And Aginor had shown him a rough piece of crystal, cupping his prize jealously in his steepling hands. Lights flickered between the vertices, following the edges._

 _"This is a model of the brain of one of my leeches. I take the network of cells and neurons, and then parse it to find the irreducible components – essentially finding the simplified network modulo these 'twisted subgroups' – and then I map the reduced structure onto the crystal. If I understand these component pieces, I understand the whole network. You follow?" Lews Therin had nodded impatiently, but in truth, most of this passed over his head._

 _"By affixing nanopiezo tungsten electrodes into the brain of my leech, I can map its brain activity at any given time onto the rubidium crystal substrate. Then... attend me, this is the good part, Lews Therin! ... if I pass a flow of Spirit and Fire just so, I can synchronise the crystal to the leech's brain in real-time._

 _In effect, I've made a living copy of the leech, the network of the crystal brain growing, adapting and changing identically to the living organism. But it's more than that... If I damage the crystal, the leech dies. If I kill the leech, the crystal stops working. So in a sense they are one and the same. So,... theoretically, it could be possible to do the same with a person's mind..." Aginor had sounded almost gleeful at the prospect, actually teasing his lips with the tip of his tongue._

 _Lews Therin had frowned, horrified. "Why in the Light would you want to do a thing like that?"_

 _Ishar had smiled, baring yellowed teeth. "Because I can, Lews Therin. Because I can. And the possibilities are endless."_

 _And suddenly, just then, a part of Lews Therin Telamon had awakened to the knowledge of just how broken, how dangerous Ishar Morad Chuain truly was._

Lews Therin had remembered this conversation, because it was the firstfruits of this experiment which had led to Aginor being expelled from the Collam Daan when he attempted to duplicate the mindstate of one of his pupils. The seemingly perfect crystal that Aginor had grown had been imperceptibly flawed and the boy had died screaming. There had been nothing that anyone could do to help him.

Aginor, of course, had been more upset by the failure of the experiment than his luckless protégé's tormented death. His high-handed defence of his unethical, immoral and highly-illegal research had only heaped more opprobrium upon his head. The vote for expulsion from the College had been unanimous. A second vote in the Hall of the Servants – also unanimous – had decreed his life forfeit. Condemned to die, Aginor had only escaped the death penalty by the T'amyrlin's veto, and had fled ahead of being incarcerated for life.

It had been Lews Therin's casting vote – life instead of death – sympathy for an autistic savant who at the time Lews Therin believed wasn't fully capable of understanding the morality of what he'd done. Guilt also motivated Lews Therin's veto, because he had known the bent of Ishar's mind and hadn't attempted to rein him in.

Yet again, the Dragon had underestimated Morad Chuain. The bookish recluse had smuggled a tiny but potent _angreal_ of his own construction into the Hall of the Servants, and when sentence had been passed, he struck out with the One Power.

In raw power, Aginor had been among the strongest of the Forsaken, behind only Ishamael and Rahvin, and his weaves were hardened, geometric blades of Spirit unlike anything the Aes Sedai had seen, honed by long and secret striving in dark places. Forms that seemed like one thing before metastasising into something else.

The Aes Sedai were driven back by his augmented might as Aginor exulted, cackling madly. Only the Dragon had been able to stand against him, drawing upon every scrap of his native might. But Aginor had finally prevailed in the trial of strength, casting Lews Therin down at his feet, shielded.

"I grant you life, because you were willing to give me mine" he had intoned, rubbing a palm through his thinning hair, breathing hard, "and for the love which I once bore you, Lews Therin. Life this day. If I see you again, I will slay you."

Aginor had uttered more fell words, words of pride and darkness that clove to his hidden heart. Among other things, he promised that he would rape and kill Ilyena Sunhair, Lews Therin's betrothed. It was apparently the possibility of controlling Ilyena that had been the inspiration behind his invention of the mindtrap.

Lying there listening to his ravings, the Dragon realised that he had been wrong. Wrong to vote to grant this creature life.

Thinking about the _gholam,_ Draghkar _,_ Myrddraal, Trollocs and other horrors the jilted academic had subsequently unleashed upon the world, it had been a decision Lews Therin profoundly regretted all the days of his life.

There had been more to the memory of when Aginor showed him the crystal, however, and Rand al'Thor had racked his brain trying to recover it amongst Lews Therin's memories. Rand believed that the _cour'souvra_ had been one of the eventual legacies of Aginor's crystal experiment.

There was a number, keyed into the mindtrap, which controlled it, like a password. The _cour'souvra_ 's encapsulating wire cagewas an icosahedron with 20 faces and 12 vertices – one for each of the ten digits – and the other two vertices were used to enter the number pressed, or cancel the selection respectively.

Entering the correct sequence of numbers would allow the mindtrap to be locked into a hardened state where the person linked to it could not be accessed. If he could remember the right number, he could lock it, thereby preventing ignorant or malicious hands harming Elayne through the crystal.

Then, in a flash, he'd remembered the rest of what Aginor had said. "...Symmetry. And there are certain keystone numbers which are fundamental to _everything_. The source code for reality, if you will. Transcendental numbers – infinite, never-repeating continued fractions in base 10. For example, there is _pi,_ which crops up everywhere. But, for this crystal, the fundamental number is _e,_ which among other things is the ratio at which the mind-state network grows at before senescence is achieved. .."

There was more, but he had what he needed. Ten vertices for ten digits. _e_ written as a continued fraction base 10. _e_ to its 9'th decimal place. 2.718281828. The recurrent part of the sequence terminated at the tenth digit. Easy to remember, nigh impossible to guess and with a certain elegance that was almost cabalistic. Numerology. _Geometry and symmetry._ It was exactly the way Aginor thought.

 _Worth a try_ , Rand thought. It wasn't as if he had any better ideas. Rand had just enough time to input the numbers, fumbling with the mindtrap, and press 'Enter'.

For an instant, nothing happened. Then the stone had begun to grow more opaque, less translucent, its regular structure becoming plastic, swelling and expanding to subsume the containing wire cage, before hardening to a uniform white surface with twelve tiny indentations arranged with geometric regularity around it.

In this state, the mindtrap was safely closed off, giving no clue to its function. And the only key to it was in his head. Elayne's identity was safe. Unless the number could be tortured out of him. Unfortunately, even in this configuration, the _cour'souvra_ was still frangible, Rand knew, though it would take considerably more force to shatter it. A hammer-blow, say, would be sufficient. It was the best he could do to protect her. Not enough but better than nothing.

He'd barely been in time. Five minutes later, the Seeker, in his formal regalia emblazoned with Tower and Raven, had arrived. And right now, Rand was wishing he'd taken his chance to abscond, taking the mindtrap with him.

* * *

Under guard, he had been dragged before a young High Lord who styled himself the Emperor Mordred Paendrag II, and thrown on his face before him, bound hand and foot. Mordred. A name of dark doom, befitting an indurate young man, hard as al'Lan Mandragoran without his tempering of humanity. Rand guessed he was the leader of the attackers' faction. There was something in his eyes that reminded him of Tuon. Judge's eyes that assessed him dispassionately.

Mordred had dismissed all the guards and attendants. "So, you are one of those that the _Atha'an Shadar_ amongst my people call _Da'concion._ The Chosen." It was not a question, but a statement. Voice a flat drawl, but there was something of the Westlands in it as well. _Interesting._ This young man had spent much of his life this side of the Aryth Ocean. Yes, there was something of Andor in his voice, and Rand thought again of the conversation he'd overheard between the Band captain and the _sul'dam. Could this be Mat and Tuon's son?_

Rand's mouth tightened, as he briefly thought of telling the man exactly who he was. It was out of the question, of course. Especially after having watched this young man's forces ruthlessly attack a peaceful city without provocation or warning. Even if he _was_ Mat's son, he saw little of his friend in the man who stood before him, sipping at a cup of _kaf._

There was something disquieting in the fact that he could see little even of Tuon in him, despite their physical resemblance. Where Tuon was channelled passion, this young man was glacial. There was cold, banked animus in the youth's eye when he saw Rand would not answer him, and he bent the force of his will upon Rand to compel him to speak. This was a man used to being obeyed immediately, and without hesitation. But when Mordred spoke, his voice was calm and restrained. Controlled. Clipped diction.

"Very well, if you will not speak, then I shall pass sentence. You are Moridin, otherwise known as Ishamael. Betrayer of Hope. _Nae'blis._ Chief and captain among the Shadowsouled in both the War of the Power and at _Tarmon Gai'don_. Before you turned to the Shadow, you bore the name Elan Morin Tedronai. You were a theologian and philosopher whose studies led you to conclude the Dark One's victory was assured.

It is fitting that you are brought before me in chains for judgement, Ishamael. Of all nations yet extant in the sphere of the World, it is my people who have been most injured, shaped by your actions. The Wheel spun your thread out as Jalwin Moerad, and you rose to be High Chancellor to Artur Hawkwing.

It was upon your counsel that the first High King sent his forces across the Aryth Ocean. Your counsel that led to war with Tar Valon. You destroyed the Empire this side of the Ocean, your hand behind the knife that took the lives of Marithelle Camaelaine, Norodim Nosokawa, and then Elfraed Guitama, who could have held together Hawkwing's kingdom here. Ever has your hand been turned against my folk, Jalwin Moerad. I know you for what you are. The enemy of my race.

Before I pass sentance, I have more to say, questions to ask. You are not the first of the _Da'concion_ I have encountered. Know you that I encountered the one known as the Spider. She and another Darkfriend, Liandrin Guirale, took something that belongs to me. It is called a Darkbox. I want it back. And I think you know where it is. I believe Moghedien is your cat's-paw, still acting under your authority, _Nae'blis._

I also want to know the function of the _ter'angreal_ you bore when my men apprehended you. Give me what I want, and I will give you more honour than you deserve. A nobleman's death, according to your former station as a High Lord of the Raven Empire. Deny me, and you will die the meanest death a man ever died."

Rand tried to absorb the ramifications of what Mordred had said. At the very least, the High Lord was unscrupulous enough to knowingly deal with Darkfriends. The man had said that much straight out. And as for the so-called Darkbox... There had been rumours that had reached Lews Therin's ears. Rand suppressed a shudder.

This Mordred Paendrag was a Darkfriend, maybe something worse. There was no way he could tell this man the nature of the _cour'souvra._ Even if it had been Tuon – who had been a honourable foe and a friend of the Light – that he stood before and not this young blacklance, he could not give the mindtrap of the Queen of Andor to the Empress of Seanchan, Dragon's Peace or no. Rand was suddenly furiously angry. Righteous anger.

"My name is _not_ Ishamael. I am not one of the Forsaken. I walk in the Light! Mordred Paendrag, I name you Darkfriend and attainted under the Light. Why don't you just admit what you are? Or are you too craven to acknowledge the truth even to yourself?"

Sudden, blinding pain, and Rand was lying on his side, blinking. Mordred had struck him to the floor with an expertly-delivered blow of his fist. The young man hadn't even spilled a drop of his _kaf,_ despite the considerable force of the blow he had administered with his free hand. _Well trained, this one. Lan would be impressed. Except for the small matter of his being a Darkfriend, of course._

"I need not justify myself to you, Jalwin Moerad." Mordred responded icily. "Ever you have been the liar, and have given poor service and lying counsel both to the Great Lord and to the Seanchan – as have the other Forsaken, Moghedien and Semirhage. The Lord of the Evening has been a true ally to me and to Seanchan, but I account the Forsaken no friends of ours. I declare the self-styled _Da'concion_ anathema, and I will not rest until you are all dead.

You've had your chance, Moridin. I won't waste further time upon you. You will be sent to the uttermost reaches of the Towers of Midnight, a prison that none escape. There, I have loyal servants who will render the information I require from your lying body." Mordred Paendrag raised his voice, summoning the guards and _damane_ from where they waited. "Take this wretch from my presence."


	18. Chapter 18: Towers of Midnight

**Chapter 18: Towers of Midnight**

The deserted city of Imfaral perched like a darkling bird atop gaunt cliffs of black basalt that climbed high above the Straits of Sherkin. Beneath, the Bore – a torrent of heated salt water from the Tropics – pounded inexorably North towards the polar ice from the Cape of Quirat.

Twice daily, the waters forcing their way into the channel from the Morenal Ocean to the East sent a tidal wave twenty feet high running Northwards, at a pace outstripping a galloping horse, a smooth and glossy surge half a league in length. There were caverns and grottoes undercutting the apparent solidity of the cliff face, where the grinding waters had hollowed out layers of softer sedimentary rock into a cavern system, which the original denizens had exploited over the centuries to mine for metals and minerals deep below the surface.

Ancient, Imfaral had upon a time been the fortified capital of a prosperous Northern kingdom. But even by the time Luthair Paendrag had taken the city, a thousand years ago, the miners of Imfaral had worked the seams of silver, tin and gold beneath their city until the ground would yield no more. Because of their rapacious excavations, the ground had become dangerously unstable, prone to subsidence, yawning sinkholes opening up and swallowing whole buildings overnight.

The people had deserted the city, travelling South to Asinbayar or North and then South again to Sonma and Quirat. Within a handful of generations, a nation had dispersed, vanished, and the wilderness had reclaimed Imfaral, pace by pace, scrub grass, gorse and briars setting their roots where people had once dwelled.

Where Imfaral had sheltered from the buffeting stormwinds under the eaves of the Asinbayar Mountains, only its citadel remained aloof, the imposing Towers of Midnight. Founded upon the bones of the mountain, from the Straits, they rose like a stand of conifers leaning into the wind – fragile reeds they seemed under the lashing majesty of that restless, turbulent sky.

Yet atop those treacherous cliffs, looking up revealed their true authority and strength. There were thirteen Towers in all, rising seamless and sheer from their base – monolithic cylinders fifty yards in diameter founded from a sooty-black stone – a quarter-mile into the air, before gradually tapering to their full height, an awesome half-mile above the plain. Whatever the skill of their Ogier stonemasons, the winds would surely have prevailed and thrown them down for their hubris, except that the edifice had been strengthened with the One Power, rendered near-indestructible.

The Towers of Midnight were founded upon a spur of the mountain jutting into the Straits of Sherkin, with the land breaking into a peninsula, separated from the city it dominated by a sheer-sided chasm. Sheltered by the mountain flank, the harbour of Imfaral was founded. In the lee of the outcropping of rock, the Imfarali had laboured to raise a mole a quarter-league in length to protect the harbour from the tidal surges of the Straits.

Yet the waters behind were treacherous, choppy, and so the ingenious founders had constructed a nested series of saltwater locks, where by stages ships could be raised into a marina a safe thirty-five feet higher than the sea below, where they could be laden and unladen in safety.

The nature of the Straits and the harbour ensured no foe could disembark in safety under the gaze of the Citadel. Yet when Luthair Paendrag had come in might, with three hundred thousand men and two thousand ships, finding only curious shepherds to mark his landfall, a single swift slant-rigged caravel had braved the harbour in broad daylight, unopposed by force, and her crew had commandeered the locks.

Ten thousand men had disembarked from ten great transports while the rest of his mighty army beat across the Straits to make an easier landfall outside Seandar. They had provisioned the great fortress of the North with great store and gear of war. It had been a keystone in the eventual Consolidation of the western continent for eight hundred years: a grim city of war quartered by the hard-eyed fighting men of the East.

Afterwards, with the land secured, the Towers of Midnight had fallen once more into disuse. It was a haunted place, men said. The superstitious native people feared the treacherous ground. The Eastern colonizers dreaded the unquiet spirits of the Aes Sedai that haunted the Citadel. Revenants of the first _damane,_ collared by Artur Paendrag Tanreall. It had been said that the cry of the first, Deain Sedai, had shaken the Towers of Midnight like an anvil ringing under the blow of the hammer.

Once, these people had venerated the White Tower and all it stood for. Though they clove to their High King, many had seen his treatment of the Aes Sedai as a betrayal, and their numinous fear had only grown. Eventually, the Towers had been abandoned, leaving the unquiet spirits to rule their dominion.

Now the Towers of Midnight were inhabited once again. For a time, the claimant Handoin had stationed a force within the Citadel, intending to use it as a base, much as his distant ancestor had. But the Raven Prince had shown him the error of his thinking in the new ways of war. Walls were no defence against Gateways and Travelling.

Having taken the Dark Citadel, it had become the keystone of Maitrim Cauthon's Reconsolidation campaign in the North, impregnable against a foe that had not rediscovered Travelling.

With the grassfire of rebellion almost extinguished, the Towers now found use as a secure prison-complex, as well as a quartermaster's store and a kind of gigantic Customs-house for the processing and resettling of displaced refugees, with thousands of people arriving and departing daily via Gateway.

* * *

Rand al'Thor was one amongst many thousands entering the Dark Citadel. Unlike most, he'd earned the distinction of arriving via Gateway at the foot of the southernmost Tower under armed guard. The air was humid, stiff with salt. His ears rang with the incessant pounding of the waves on the rocks far below. An appalling, inhuman din.

This was an alien, violent place that bore the presence of man grudgingly, dangling him like gullbait between the anvil of the unforgiving rock – both natural and man-made – and the hammer of the sea.

Rand looked up at the brooding column of stone he stood beneath, observing a speck suspended far above. One of his guards sneered. "See that, do you? That's the body of the late High Lord Handoin, hung to dry-cure like a side of ham. If you play your cards right, we might string you up alongside him. You'll be begging for the release of death, once the Seekers begin to have their fun with you." A heavy hand on his collar. "Step this way, if you'd be so kind, _Chosen."_

When the boy Emperor had threatened him with imprisonment in the uttermost reaches of the Towers of Midnight, he'd imagined a dungeon far below the earth. Instead, he had climbed a weary stair, up and up countless thousands of paces, until his muscles were water, before arriving at his destination at the tower's very top.

The door of unbreakable iron – Power-hardened like a Warder's sword – closed behind him with a crash, leaving him in total darkness. The walls were the same indurate black stone as the tower's surface, as far as he could tell, groping in the dark. Likely Power-strengthened in the same fashion as the walls of Tar Valon. Resistent even to channelling. Even if the Creator had given him access to _saidin_ again, at his former strength, it would be laborious to dig his way out of here.

He'd endured a paroxysm of utter terror when that door clanged shut behind him. For an instant, he was back in the box that Galina Casban and the other Aes Sedai had put him in. His claustrophobia welled up, threatening to unman him, only abating when he found he was able to pace a good distance in the cell before finding the next wall.

Near as Rand could tell, he was in a cube some fifteen paces square, its regularity only broken by the door and a round hole about a pace and a half across in one of the corners opposite the door. The sewer smell emanating from it informed him of its purpose. It was the only amenity in this dungeon, but he was grateful for it.

At first his captors had left him alone in the dark, hoping that the sensory deprivation would be the most effective way of breaking him. He'd measured time by the intervals between when he was fed – a hatch in the door being opened and meagre rations of food and water shoved through.

Assuming they weren't toying with his sense of time by feeding him at random intervals, Rand judged he'd been in this place – his own personal Darkbox – perhaps three days. Maybe four. The water tasted foul, brackish, but seemed to do him no harm.

He'd deduced that the taste was due to it being steeped in forkroot. Seanchan reliability. They were taking no chances with him. From that, he further inferred they _had_ to be feeding him regularly, in order to ensure a constant dose.

It was cold in the cell, a constant discomfort that wasn't quite debilitating but which sapped his resilience, his mental strength to resist. The poor food was further weakening him, hunks of stale unleavened bread. It was frightening how quickly that eroded a man's determination. What he wouldn't do for a cloak. Some gloves. Some food more sustaining than the hard black rye crusts that cut his scurvied gums.

Rand slept on the stone floor, awaking shivering and weak, bones aching dully. The Flame and the Void helped him tolerate the chill to some extent, but it wasn't healthy to spend too long there, unfeeling, spiritually numb.

He fought the silence, the darknessm the cold as best as he could, trying to recite the Great Hunt of the Horn – he'd heard Thom sing it enough times to have much of it by rote – and by singing scraps of tunes. Up here, pent in stone like an insect trapped in amber, the tumult of the waves below was shut out, and his voice, friendless without even a companion echo, faltered and failed with his flagging spirits.

After the fourth day, his captors had finally lost patience with his non-compliance. A voice at the door had shouted in to inform him that if he didn't cooperate with their questions of his own volition, he would be handed over to the Seekers After Truth. That didn't sound good.

A short time later, the same voice commanded him to stand away from the door, facing the wall and place his hands behind his head. He had acquiesced, waiting for the click of the key ratcheting in the lock, waiting for the iron door to swing inwards to make his move, trying to accustom his eyes to the blinding effusion of light, readying his body and mind for combat.

Two Seanchan jailers clumped inside the cell, moving confidently to secure their prisoner when Rand spun away from the wall and attacked them with a sudden limber speed. The guards were big men, with shoulders like Master Luhhan, short clubs of wood in their ready fists. The foremost man, an open pair of manacles in his other hand, had sneered confidently, raising his billy-club to knock the prisoner senseless.

They were easy prey.

The two guards fell in as many seconds, but somebody outside quickly shut the door, and Rand heard the key turn in the lock long before he got to it, before he had a chance to make good his escape. Leaving him shut in the box with his two jailers.

Rand hailed whoever might be listening outside, threatening to slay the men he had subdued unless they let him go. There was no reply. Either there was nobody to hear his threats, or the listening guards were calling his bluff. Most likely, they had cold-bloodedly written off these two men the instant Rand had overcome them. Either way, their value as hostages appeared to be negligible.

Some time passed. Rand listened in the dark to the sound of the unconscious men breathing. Then there were more voices at the door, shuffling of feet, and Rand braced himself.

As soon as the door swung inwards, Rand hurled himself forward, eyes trying to adjust to the light. He crashed into something unyielding. It was as if he had run full-tilt into the wall. Dazed, he reeled backwards. There were eight guards, armed with big square shields and billets of wood, armoured from head to toe. They advanced in lockstep, spreading out into a clanking double line as they cleared the doorway, spanning the width of the room.

Inexorably, they drove him back, step by step until they had pinned him against the wall. Rand fought them with everything Lan and Rhuarc had ever taught him about unarmed combat, and with a desperate ferocity, but the vitals of these men were protected within their suits of iron, covered by those tall oblong shields. Those heavy scuta battered into him, bruising his legs, his arms, driving the air from his lungs until they trapped him. Then a club smashed into the crown of his head and that was that.

* * *

He awoke in hideous pain. His jailers might not have been willing to treat for the lives of their own, but it was clear that the punishment for his rebellion would be left in their willing hands. The anguish that had woken him from unconsciousness was emanating from his left elbow.

Facing him was one of the guards who he'd overcome, a brute with a bald head like a hard-boiled egg. The turnkey had a wooden mallet held loosely in one meaty fist, penduluming it lazily. Rand had been forcibly knelt upon the floor. In front of him was a crude wooden chair.

The jailer with the mallet was grinning with unfeigned delight. "Wakey wakey, sunshine," he greeted Rand. Rand looked down at his left arm in outraged disbelief, which felt as if it had been dipped in pitch and set alight. His elbow was mangled, arm bending the wrong way. _Bastard's shattered my elbow._ "Grab his other arm." the sadistic guard ordered his cohort. "Stretch it out there on the chair, there's a good lad."

Rand tried to struggle, knowing what was coming, but it was futile. The blunt head of the mell came whickering down once more. Rand screamed like a rabbit in a snare and retched, dry-heaving. "That's better" the first guard muttered approvingly. "Nearly done, oathbreaker. Flip him over onto his stomach." he ordered the other man.

Rand was roughly manhandled in the process, causing his mutilated elbows further pain. The second man sat on his back heavily to ensure he lay still for what was to follow, bending his legs at the knee to expose the soles of his bare feet.

The first of his custodians wandered round so Rand could see his grinning imp's face in all its pockmarked glory. He had a thin wooden billet of hardwood in his hand. "Now, we wouldn't want you trying to kick out at us loyal subjects of the Emperor what are only trying to doing our duty under the Light. Oh, no. But I think we can cure you of that bad habit as well," he assured Rand.

The bastinado had been the worst pain he had ever experienced, blow after blow landing on the tender soles of his feet. After a while, Rand blacked out. He came to in shock from the pain. His feet felt huge, inflated, scalding like sausages turning in the frying pan with every heartbeat.

The screw had grabbed him by the hair, tugging his face up to his, and laughed, spitting in his face contemptuously. "That'll learn ye for now. It won't kill you, never fear. Have to leave some of you for the Seekers to toy with."

 _Typical Seanchan,_ Rand thought grimly. An efficient solution to the problem posed by a difficult prisoner which didn't prevent him being of use to them. Then he had lost his senses once again.

Darkness. _Hello, old friend._


	19. Chapter 19: Gateway

**Chapter 19: Gateway**

Heady with freedom, the One Power crowning her dreadful with a thunderhead nimbus, in her first flush of liberation, Moghedien felt the sudden urge to reveal her dark majesty openly, to course through the Tarasin Palace clad in might, a conduit of Death. With _saidar_ surging through her this strongly, she felt she could do anything. A dangerous notion, surprising in its strength, its vehemence.

It was an impulse she quickly suppressed, the instincts that had served her so well over the turning of an Age reasserting themselves. These Seanchan were primitives, true, in all ways save the dealing of death. Dangerous children, but one would be a fool to underestimate them. So instead she twisted her _ara'i –_ that crackling nebula of might that announced to another woman that had the ability that the Spider was holding all the _saidar_ she could draw – hiding not only her holding the One Power but concealing her very ability to channel.

Moghedien took a minute to compose herself. To be the cold, clear centre of the universe. Emotions walled off by a sheath of Polar ice, the world of warmth and light above the frozen depths she inhabited. She would need every iota of the clarity the _ko'di_ afforded her to plan her way out of here. There was not the time to learn her environs well enough for Travelling, or even Skimming, so she would need to find her way out of here on foot.

The Palace itched with tension and suspicion, Deathwatch Guards and Blood battle-ready, hackles rising, hands eager on sword-hilts. _Damane –_ too many _damane_ – all glowing in her eyes like tiny suns. Too many to fight alone, even if the _a'dam_ leashes prevented them forming true Circles. Some of the Leashed Ones looked nervous, others sick with dread, some downright terrified. None of that mattered. The loathsome _ajah_ of _sul'dams_ that owned them looked focused, mean and ready, every one – bristling with the desperate, cornered animus of women with their backs to the wall. _That_ was what counted.

Outside the Palace walls, men and _damane_ clashed violently. Moghedien briefly wished she'd spent the time to interrogate Liandrin before she'd dismissed the chit, to draw whatever scraps of knowledge her paltry mind held about this conflict and its protagonists using Compulsion. Too late now, and she suspected Liandrin had known no more about it than she herself did in any case.

With the Mirror of Mists, Moghedien could pass herself off as anyone – from a Prince of the Blood to the lowliest _da'covale._ Continuing to masquerade as one of the Blood was too dangerous, especially when she had other options. No, it was better to be someone that had been caught up helplessly in the fighting, someone insignificant that the combatants would hopefully ignore.

The air around the Spider shivered and wrinkled as she Folded Light, the High Lady persona winking out, replaced by a scrawny scullionwith a harelip, an Ebou Dari scourer of pots and pans, in his middling years, with a paunch and a receding hairline.

Nobody gave her a second glance as she hurried out into the corridor and then ducked outside, glancing nervously about with an anxiety that did not have to be feigned. Moghedien did not need to be a tactician to know this was open ground, affording no cover. Every instinct screamed at her to scuttle away back towards the succour of the shadows.

The Mol Hara courtyard was littered with the detritus of battle, the very marble flags underfoot in places crumpled and shattered, great holes gouged out of the unyielding stone. The residue of Fire and Earth was easy to read, the afterimage testifying to the war of the Power that had been fought out here all too recently.

The protagonists had mostly departed, a few hungry _lopar_ picking through the dead bodies. Moghedien cautiously gave the carnivorous beasts a wide berth. It appeared that the fighting was mostly over for now in this part of Ebou Dar, though she could hear distant thunder originating elsewhere in the City, pillars of smoke rising in fat, black cumuli beyond the gilded, crimson-banded domes of the overlooking palaces, and over the river estuary, indicating episodic outbreaks of violence far from here. The Square and the overlooking tenements appeared deserted, but she was too long in the game to be fooled by appearances. She could feel the eyes on her back. Knew she was observed.

It was rash, foolhardy, but Moghedien was desperate to make good on her escape immediately as she scurried across the Square as quickly as she dared towards the raised plinth opposite. The Spider knew this particular spot well enough, had visited it many times to stand at attention for hours at a time as part of an Empress's guard, beside her curule chair. Moghedien's disguise would hopefully give her the element of surprise when she began to channel _saidar._ The last thing the watching eyes would expect from a man, alone.

Drawing a deep breath, she began the weave for a Gateway, a mirrored doorway between here and somewhere else, holding the tapestry of the One Power she was spinning inverted until the last instant, whereupon she pulled the net tight, the doorway snapping suddenly into existence. Half as high again as she stood and broad enough that two men could pass through it abreast, its razor-sharp edges crackled with a frosty rime that demonstrated the huge torrent of _saidar_ required to maintain the matching of the local topography of the Pattern here with that of the destination, the Gateway effectively broadcast her location to any woman who could channel within a couple of miles.

Moghedien didn't – couldn't – wait, hurling herself through in an inelegant rolling dive that barked her shins on unyielding stone as she felt the hammer fall from above, beginning the weave for _Tsorovan'vadin_ – a protective sphere of fused Earth, Air and Fire annealing around her as she released the Gateway.

The lightning that raced her flight struck once, twice, and then a third time in quick succession, arcing in brilliant and blue webs across the surface of her protective egg. Inside, she was hermetically sealed from the outside world, even from the roar of the thunder and the report of fire-blasted stone shattering that would otherwise have deafened her, the blood-bitter scent of ozone and scorched earth. Inside the safeguarding bubble, she was immune to the untrammelled force of the storm loosed upon her by angry _damane,_ but the Protective Cocoon appeared to be subject to the laws of physics to some extent.

Weighing only what Moghedien herself and the surrounding pocket of air did, the sphere was flicked dozens of feet high into the air, as if by a giant's finger, and she braced herself for the landing as she tumbled sickeningly end-over-end, suddenly weightless!

 _Bajad drovja!_ Surely, Moghedien would be splattered all over the inside of the sphere when she landed. But somehow the momentum which should have killed her was displaced in her landing, and the worst she suffered was the nausea and indignity of being spun and tossed around like a ragdoll as the sphere came to rest.

Moghedien let the weave maintaining the Cocoon go, and came unsteadily to her feet, weaving like a punch-drunk fighter as she turned back to where the afterimage of her Gateway was slowly fading away.

The weave for Balefire blazed between her hands. If any of those _damane_ had the Talent to read Residues and decided to come after her through Gateways of their own, they would rue their foolhardiness. Moghedien would run no more! If they came, she intended to sear them from the Pattern itself.

A moment passed, slowly, then another, before the Spider released a breath that she hadn't been aware that she was holding.


	20. Chapter 20: Without Forgiveness

**Chapter 20: Without Forgiveness**

The woman was old. Old beyond spite and uglier than sin, a face marred by malignity – her own, and another's. The pockmarked plain of her face was dominated by a prominent, crooked beak of a nose, her gimlet eyes misaligned, deep-seated, barren of the trace of any finer feeling. But not empty, no. They glittered with vindictiveness and hate and the will to dominate.

They were hungry eyes. Ay, and thirsty too. The Waste had not been kind to the woman known as Hessalam. To come to this place, at its ends, had been a lonely path through the shifting sands where for days the only sign of life were the transient tracks her stumbling path had traced, marks that the dust-devils were quick to buff out, leaving the sand pristine once more.

The Trollocs called the Aiel Waste _Djevik K'Shar_ in their black speech. It meant the Dying Ground, and the old woman had come close to perishing unnumbered times in crossing it under a fever-blue sky, trudging over mica sands glazed a hundred shades of white by the burnished-gold coin of her oppressing sun.

It had desiccated her, reducing her once-ample frame to a scarecrow of kindling-brittle bones, strung together with sinew and gristle, draped with the faded vellum of her skin, which cracked and peeled. Her clothing was reduced to unidentifiable rags, grimy with the salt of her sweat and tears. Malnutrition had loosened the teeth in her gums, her breath sickly-sweet with ketosis as her body broke down wasted muscles for food. Much of her hair had fallen out, too, the rest hanging lank in brittle strings that had bleached white.

Yet it was not malice, nor rancour – nor even her domineering will – that had carried her so far across the gulf of the Waste to its heart and antithesis, the lush city of Rhuidean. Those things could perhaps have instigated one such as Hessalam to make the attempt, could have upheld her for many miles, but none of these traits could have goaded her across the desert. She would instead have abandoned her quest to find the lost city and simply Travelled away to greener climes while she still had the strength to do so, or if she had foolhardily pressed on after strength was gone, she would surely have faltered and died long ago, leaving a foetal, shrunken corpse to be buried by the endless sands.

But it was the love of a woman, an all-encompassing devotion to the statuesque goddess with hair like the sacred fires of Paaran Disen, with her cat-quick eyes, green as malachite, filled with scorn, duty and anger that had sustained Hessalam, seen her to her goal. A sirocco of a woman, a desert storm!

They had fought, raking each other with jagged blades of the One Power, before Hessalam had been overcome with rapture, with adoration, and would contend with her no more. She had been stricken when she saw the damage she had dealt to the beautiful one, and as her beloved swooned and lost consciousness, Hessalam had borne her lifeless body from the field. For all her strength and talent, the old woman had but a negligible ability for Healing, so she had taken her to the Wise Ones among the beloved's people. It was a moment that she would cherish forever, clutching her precious burden to her.

The Aiel woman was rangy, slim but well-muscled, like a runner or a dancer, cunning curves that entranced the old woman, but her unconscious form was heavy, and Hessalam had been weak, had struggled manfully to lift her, for purchase. Her head had lain in the crook of Hessalam's arms, against her shoulder, that magnificent mane of hair warm against the old woman's bare forearm. Her _shoufa_ had fallen from her face and lay about her neck, and beneath it, her drawn face was soft, young and vulnerable, shockingly pale under the tawny gold of her tan.

Consumed with shame, appalled at the hideous injuries she had inflicted upon this lioness of a woman, whose legs and feet she had lacerated, mutilated with terrible gashes, racked by guilt Hessalam had fled once she had returned the flame-haired one to her people.

Hessalam had always intended to return, to serve her – to be her dog, if need be – but Sharans had swept Hessalam up with them in their rout, imprisoned her, and it had been many long years before she had schemed her way to freedom. She had tried in the intervening years to track her down.

Aviendha, Wise Woman of the Nine Valleys sept of the Taardad Aiel.

Hessalam clutched the name to her, whispered it through chipped and blistered lips as the sun down on her remorselessly. That, and the memory of how it felt to hold Aviendha in her arms were the blanket of comfort, and the spur that cruelly impelled her forwards. It cosseted her – and maddened her so she could never rest.

Six months back, she had Compelled another Taardad Aiel in Malkier, who had told her that Aviendha was to be found in Rhuidean. The Threefold Land was vast, uncharted, its secrets jealously guarded by the Aiel. Even the Chosen did not know much of the Aiel Waste. She had Skimmed to _Al'Cair Dal_ , the Golden Bowl, a location that pedlars were allowed to visit to trade. It was a place she had been to once before, with Asmodean.

Once there, she had used the Mirror of Mists to disguise herself as an Aiel Wise Woman. Her deception had been discovered, and Hessalam had barely escaped with her life. With the Aiel on high alert, it seemed she would have to brave the journey alone.

An impossible task, except that she had a _paralis-net_ – a collection of _ter'angreal_ that complemented each other. One of these was a silver needle, a Seeker which behaved like a compass, except that it indicated the direction of the place you sought – sadly, it only worked with places, not people! The Seeker had pointed the way, and she had set off, stealing provisions for the journey and a pedlar's mule to bear them for her into the trackless wastes.

The mule had plodded on uncomplainingly for three days before dropping without protest, quite dead. After that, Hessalam had been truly alone, carrying what she could. She had used every trick of the One Power she knew to survive the Dying Ground.

There was water, even in air as dry as this, and she made Weaves to wring what moisture there was from the air, and to collect it. She had better luck – after some experimentation – with reclaiming water from the sweat on her person and her garments, and from her bodily functions, distasteful as that was. Yet it wasn't enough. She often thought longingly of the dead mule. A treasure trove of water in the dead animal's blood and sweat that she'd passed up in her ignorance. Ignorance killed.

Next, Hessalam had tried Dowsing, holding twin rods of pure Water outstretched in front of her to search for water underground. If she felt these threads twitch, it indicated there was a body of water underground, close nearby. If they crossed, that meant she was right on top of it.

Three times, by this method she had managed to discover an aquifer deep underground, and had drilled a hole using Earth and Fire to tap the hidden trove, then fabricated a straw of Air and Water to draw it up to the surface. The drawn water had been bitter as gall, brackish, steeped in mineral deposits and lead, but it was cold and it quenched, and that made it wonderful beyond description. She'd refilled her literjons, but there was only so much a person could carry.

Her last recourse was a very old magic, and a very dark one. Even in this barren place, creatures managed to eke out an existence – leathery lizards and snakes, even a type of mongoose that preyed upon the snakes and lizards. The occasional hawk, high above. Hessalam reached out with _saidar_ to seize control of the tiny, quivering minds within, forcing them to come to her. Then she would kill them, too, and render them for water. Food, too that she cooked inexpertly with flows of Fire, gamy hunks of flesh that was either underdone or blackened and charred, but it was always the need for water that superseded all other demands.

In these ways, Hessalam survived an eternity, stumbling through a featureless hell. There were times when she knew that there were Aiel out there, observing her dispassionately as she crawled like an ant under a magnifying glass. They saw a water-weak Wetland woman who was going to die. Why waste the energy on killing her, even though her presence here was proscribed?

Later, as she drew yet closer to the Hidden City, the Aiel might have killed her out of hand. No outsider was ever meant to come to Rhuidean. But they watched her channel, and because of that either thought she was a Wise One or maybe an Aes Sedai, which they seemed to hold in similar esteem. Either way, they did not seek to stop her, nor help her. But neither did she see a single one, except once, and even then, only through the eyes of a pouch-cheeked rat she was Borrowing the mind of. A couple of _Far Dareis Mai,_ loping steadily on a path that would eventually converge with hers at Rhuidean.

By then she had been in the deep desert. The rat was the last living thing she had seen for a long time. Days? Time, distance alike lost meaning out here. The constant glare of sun on sand was making her snowblind.

Sanity ebbed and flowed. It was funny. You only realised you had been out of your mind when briefly convalescing. The pain and the thirst weren't the worst of it, the process abrading her tenuous grasp on reality. It was the dilation of time. Eternity in a heartbeat. It was too much conscious effort to try and arrest the process.

Sanity didn't matter. Only the flame-haired woman, the ache for water and shade from the lidless eye of the Sun that regarded her with all the pity of the Great Lord.

And then Rhuidean had risen from the rolling waves of the sea of sand, refracted in the heat-haze that lensed the air making near things far, and sometimes far things tantalisingly near, only to recede heartbreakingly towards the blank horizon. Hessalam's hope-starved mind had learnt the painful lessons by then. It was just another mirage. Just follow the needle, put your head down and look at the ground ahead, not up at that abyssal sky that set you at naught, nor at the cursed phantasm of hope your broken mind had conjured.

Then all at once, there had been buildings in front of her – not the rude squalor of an Aiel clan hold, but an impossibility here in the heart of a desert, majestic dwellings of Ogier stonework. In a fallen time, these were as noble as anything from the Age of Legends itself, even the grandeur of lost Paaran Disen.

She was staggering along a street, between these buildings, her cracked and bruised feet on a road of stone that had resolved from the dunes. People in white, coming towards her, concern on their faces. To help? It didn't matter. Real or mirage, she could – would – walk no further. Not even for the flame-haired woman. She reeled and pitched forward, insensible. Darkness followed, cool and sweet.

* * *

When Hessalam awoke, it was to a cold compress upon her brow, a young woman robed in white looking gravely down upon her. She was indoors, inside one of those fabulously opulent buildings, though inside it seemed curiously unfurnished, like a home being shown for sale. The few items of furnishing in the room didn't fit the sculpted stone and shaped wood of the construction – they were mismatched, one with another, too. Plain, hard-wearing items such as a tall sandalwood-framed mirror with a large chip in it, alongside gilt-rimed Tairen artworks. Otherwise, it was like a cameo from a life she'd once known and for a moment, she fancied she might be in the Hall of the Servants, a Da'shain Aiel tending her after some mishap.

One look at the face of the woman under the cowl disabused her of that. It was a hard face, uncompromising for all its youth, and yet it wore docility, even meekness with a kind of exasperated determination. This was no Da'shain.

The Da'shain Aiel were three thousand years dead. The last of them had built this city around the artefacts the last Aes Sedai had borne here, fleeing the Breaking. Some said the Da'shain had vanished along with those they served.

In fact, a remnant of the Da'shain had become the Aiel, a people scarred by their failure to meet their obligation to the Aes Sedai they served as the Jenn Aiel – the True Dedicated – and their latter abandonment of the Way of the Leaf. Yet they had remembered the True Dedicated and honoured both them and the sanctity of Rhuidean, and their culture was indelibly marked with tantalising clues as to what they had once been.

This tough young woman tending her, for example, was _gai'shain._ 'One Sworn To Peace In Battle' was the most literal translation, but like so much in the Old Tongue it meant so much more. The _gai'shain_ – sworn to serve in meekness and humility, to touch no weapon and to do no violence for a year and a day – were the closest approximation to the Jenn the fierce Aiel clans could produce.

Hessalam grinned mirthlessly. As well dress up a hawk in a petticoat and call it a peacock! She had harboured nothing but contempt for the original Jenn that these Aiel now venerated, and their pathetic Way of the Leaf. These Aiel, though…

"Drink up." Those blue eyes weighed her dispassionately, the arm cradling her neck strong enough to snap Hessalam's neck like kindling. A wealth of suspicion in her gaze, a soldier's decisiveness in her manner. And yet, this formidable young woman would stand by meekly and let Hessalam kill her if she so chose. The Jenn had been _weak._ The Way of the Leaf was the only option for them because they _had_ no strength. This woman was anything but. Hard. Unyielding. Purposeful. And yet she chose to make herself defenceless. _Bizarre._ The water was pure, clean. Perfect. Heady. Her parched throat ached as she gulped at it greedily.

The _gai'shain_ looked down critically, and there was an almost imperceptible softening in her expression. "Light, but you are half dead" the _gai'shain_ intoned softly. "And yet you somehow came here, where you should not, unaided. And now you are here, you present us with a quandary. There is to be no killing in Rhuidean. It is held a sacred place. To me, it seems that it would be best to turn you back into the desert. But perhaps the Three-Fold Land spared you for some purpose. Perhaps if a Wise One came here, she might know what to do. But there are none here at this time."

Hessalam moaned in despair. All this way, for _nothing._

"Aviendha"

The word escaped her chapped lips before she knew what she was saying. The _gai'shain_ looked at her with renewed intensity, knuckles tightening, a hand stealing towards a belt-knife that was no longer there before falling away regretfully. _Yes, this one is an Aiel Maiden._ How could she be so thoughtless? So careless with her words? An easy answer, there. Exhaustion. Bone-deep.

"What do _you_ know of Aviendha?"

Hessalam was still trying to work out how she might safely answer that question when the cresting wave of her fatigue crashed over her.

* * *

Hessalam was seated on a stone bench, which had been carried there across the immense square by a score of compliant _gai'shain._ There was a goblet of cut glass in her hand, containing none of the spiced wines the old woman had savoured in previous times. No, by the Great Lord, it would be a long time indeed before she would consider drinking anything, _anything,_ other than miraculous, life-giving water.

In another irony she found particularly piquant, the water here was an unintended gift from an old enemy, Rand al'Thor. He had located a deep and plentiful aquifer underground and now Rhuidean bloomed with life. Water spouted playfully from fountains, gurgling as it filled the great stone basins.

The plaza of dazzling white quartzite was marred by a deep rift, a sheer-sided gulf fifty feet wide. As Hessalam followed the line with her eye, she saw its true, horrifying extent. A gouge through the landscape that split city and Chaendaer plain asunder, as far as the horizon, the whole landscape uplifted on one side by some ten feet above the other!

The Forsaken shuddered when she saw how the ravine carved a gash straight through the overlooking mountain peak. She understood well enough how that had come to pass. An elemental battle between the Dragon Reborn and Asmodean, wresting for control of the Choedan Kal _sa'angreal._ This swath of destruction, the tectonic upheaval of the earth, the merest backwash of the encounter.

The city itself remained surprisingly intact, all things considered. Here and there, a heap of rubble remained where once a palace stood, but elsewhere, proud towers cleaved the sky, obelisks of sharp white rock rearing alongside jagged remnants of walls. The ruins of Rhuidean had an elegiac dignity. An echo of a lost world, a memorial pitted and scarred, shielded by the mountains.

Yet it was a cradle for life. The shell of a wren's egg, impossibly fragile, fractured shards of calcium carbonate cupped in the hollow of a hand. The bird hatched, the nest flown. Rhuidean, a singularity in the Mirrors of the Wheel, shielded and inaccessible even in _Tel'aran'rhiod,_ had broken open, hatching the Dragon upon the Wheel of Time. The stable fixed point in reality now a bifurcation, the copies of Rhuidean diverging across the Worlds That Are.

What price that individuality, that deidentification? What did that signifiy for the Mirrors of the Wheel? For _ta'maral'ailen_ itself?

Only the use of an enormity of the One Power could have achieved that outcome. If the multiverse was a book, with _Tel'aran'rhiod_ the spine holding it together, the pages of the book would be the individual worlds – the Mirrors of the Wheel. The titanic energies of the struggle over the Choedan Kal had mostly propagated in-between the Mirrors of the Wheel – between the leaves of the book that made up the multiverse, splaying the pages further apart. Anywhere else in the world, the forces unleashed by Rand's battle with Asmodean would have simply destroyed this particular world, coring it like an apple.

Hessalam shuddered. All things considered, that might have been a less destructive outcome. For all she knew, the worlds were flying further and further apart, a sheaf of paper scattered before the gale.

The Dragon brought incalculable destruction in his wake.

Since the Last Battle, Rhuidean had become inhabited once again, by those who had put down the spears forever. Before, Rhuidean had only been visited by would-be Clan Chiefs or Wise Ones, who came just once, to be tested in the _ter'angreal_. They had walked through the forest of fluted glass columns that rose impossibly high and delicate and seen the visions of the Aiel's past. Those that survived returned to their people to lead. Then Rand al'Thor had come, and the _Car'a'carn_ had shared the sin of the Aiel people with all of them.

It had broken them. Many had cast away their spears, overcome by the Bleakness, and left clan and society, left their people. Some had come through that dark journey and decided that the way of meeting their _toh_ was to put on white, forever. And a remnant of that remnant had returned here, to Rhuidean. To them, it was still sacred, but it was no longer an empty cathedral, but a living city where children played, splashing through the fountains, and smiling men and women dressed in a motley of the _cadin'sor_ and _gai'shain_ white walked arm in arm in a paradise beyond their wildest hopes, water-rich beyond dreaming, beyond deserving.

They did not dare to call themselves Jenn – it would be a sin of pride, and a lie for those who had formerly shed blood. They were not the True Dedicated. But they began to see themselves as more than _gai'shain,_ too. Not just Those Sworn to Peace in Battle, but Those Dedicated To Peace. _Da'shain._ Perhaps their children, and their children's children would be ready to take the mantle and become what they could not.

Hessalam knew there was power in words. Especially names. Her own, for example. _Without Forgiveness_. She knew these things about the Da'shain Aiel here because she had forced a web of Compulsion upon the hard-faced _gai'shain_ who had attended her as soon as she had the strength.

Bristling like a crown of thorns, the weave settled upon the girl's head, seeping into her as Hessalam ruthlessly drew the Compulsion tight, sinking its barbs into every facet of her consciousness and personality. What she had done was permanent, the Aiel no more than an automaton. What she had done, only one other living person could undo, but the process of Compulsion overwrote much of the conscious brain, depending upon what was required. It was probably more than the situation strictly required, but it was good to feel _strong_ again.

Even if somebody managed to remove the web, much of the Aiel girl's conscious brain and a good deal of her central nervous system would be erased in the process. She would die shortly thereafter. Hessalam shrugged. It made her wonderfully obedient and tractable, and that was what counted.

The _gai'shain_ compliantly rattled off all the information Hessalam asked for. She had been – was? – _gai'shain,_ not one of these new Dai'shain, had been a solitary day away from putting off the white and picking up the spears again. Hessalam remembered her granite face and appraising eyes. How fortunate for her – and how unfortunate for the Aiel girl – that Hessalam hadn't met her a day later. Now, the _gai'shain's_ face wore a sleepy, almost childlike cast. It reminded her of Aviendha that fateful day.

Aviendha was back in Malkier, with her clan once more. It transpired that if Hessalam had been patient, and tarried in Malkier a few more days, then they could have been reunited. But Hessalam knew that the Compulsion she herself suffered wouldn't permit her the luxury of waiting.

She remembered now, how the web of Compulsion that she had struck at Aviendha with had rebounded onto her, and that because of it she now was devoted to the Aiel woman with the eyes of jade and hair like burnished copper.

The rebounded web was a snarl of knives cutting into Hessalam's personality and her instinct was to fight it with every scrap of her old, cunning and selfish heart. But she knew that would kill her, and it truly didn't matter, not at all. She _enjoyed_ worshipping Aviendha. How foolish and hollow her old life had been, as Graendal, surrounded with her pretty playthings, compliant and beautiful as they had been. It amazed her – the eminent psychologist – that she had not seen to the heart of this obvious truth.

No, she would find Aviendha, and take her somewhere safe where she and she alone could dote on her. The world did not deserve to see the wonder of her. That privilege would be reserved for Hessalam alone. Hessalam knew that the Aiel woman would be stubborn at first, that it might take months or even years for her to understand how perfect Hessalam's love was, but she was patient. Patient – and if need be, Hessalam could alleviate the process with the helping hand of a smidgen of Compulsion herself, applied compassionately. For example, little things like forbidding Aviendha to strike out at her with the Power while they worked things out. Nothing too serious, just enough to get them through the inevitable teething problems.

She was the Lover, and Aviendha was the Beloved! Hessalam was a woman with eons of experience, Aviendha a tender girl that needed instruction, who could not be expected to know her own good. And Hessalam would find what she had always sought her whole life – first as Kamarile Maradim Nindar the great ascetic. Unswerving devotion to something far greater than herself.

Karamile's lofty ideals had been dashed and battered by the fallen-ness of human nature and the incipient trait in the human condition that was content to say 'good enough' without striving for perfection. So her high ideals balked, she had become Graendal, and wallowed in hedonism, like a pig in the trough. Now she could be fulfilled in devotion. To her Beloved and to the Love itself. She would make Aviendha perfect. Refine her, shape her like a sculptor's chisel turning a block of marble into a flawless statue.

There were few Aiel here that were not sworn to peace. The handful belonging to warrior societies, Hessalam had bound to her with Compulsion. There were no Wise Ones, which was a distinct relief. Most of the Dai'shain in the bustling square were oblivious to her quick plucking of this low-hanging fruit. Secure in a fool's paradise, they were carefree, not knowing that Heartseeker was amongst them. The more curious ones, she had also snared in her net.

She was Hessalam, and whilst she might be striving to become perfect in love, there could be no forgiveness for the Aiel. Especially and particularly not for the Jenn and the Dai'shain, who had, despite their revolting pacifism, consistently thwarted her aims and those of the Great Lord. In the Breaking, they had preserved the power of the female Aes Sedai, setting the world back onto a more stable path.

Hessalam extended her goblet and the _gai'shain_ filled it from a brass pitcher. The old crone smiled a twisted smile. This hard-faced spelk of a girl with her broken nose and knife-scars was likely the ugliest creature she'd had serve her in the past thousand years, and she had no station whatsoever, but somehow having her as the first of her new pets seemed so _right._

This child had struggled mightily to be an acceptably meek and mild _gai'shain_ against her own obdurate nature. It was so fitting that Hessalam could train her how to be the perfect servant. Had she bothered to ask the girl's name? No matter. "I will call you Masia," she informed her. It was the name one might give to a faithful hound. "Answer to it and no other." Yes, she would keep this one. It might make Aviendha happy to have her as a servant, someone familiar, from her culture that would help her state of mind whilst she acclimatised.

Yes, it was very pleasant sitting here, under the shade of a massive _chora_ tree. The trunk was pitted with a long and deep gash – made by Fire, unless Graendal missed her mark – and the heartwood could clearly be seen, but it was steadily healing.

Strictly speaking, the _chora_ was not just flora, it was a Construct, like the mighty Nym. Imbued with a dim and benevolent sentience, the _chora_ gave a feeling of peace to those who sheltered beneath its mighty canopy, shaded by the distinctive lobed trefoil leaves. Once, these had been everywhere – hundreds in Paaran Disen alone. Now there was only this one in the whole world. It was called Avendesora. The Tree of Life.

Despite its maiming, it now blossomed, fragile white-silver petals the same hue as the bark of her trunk. The Aiel venerated it. They had fought a war against the rest of the world because the Cairhenin king, Laman, had dared cut down one of its progeny. And the Aiel tended this tree as if it was the heart of the living world. Sang to it, like a child in the cradle.

Hessalam was done here. Finishing the last of the water, she tossed her glass aside, to shatter on the flags of the square. Masia scurried to pick up the pieces, in the process gashing her hand on one of the shards. "Leave that, girl" she commanded, her harsh voice carrying, cutting imperiously over the merrymaking crowd. Curious faces turned to her. Some even sported garlands of blossoms, blessings that had fallen from the great tree. Nobody would pull living flowers from the Tree of Life.

 _Without Forgiveness_. Amongst the Forsaken, Hessalam was accounted mighty – not the strongest in the Power in raw might, but regarded as amongst the most dangerous, feared and fearless exponents in a duel.

The Forsaken drew _saidar_ to her like a lover, splitting her weaves again, again, and again – lightning, fireballs, a shield just-in-case – you never knew! Scalding webs of Spirit and Fire. Compulsion, of course. None in that crowd knew her for what she was, could channel or see her _ara'i_ but somehow, Aiel were taking an involuntary backward step, and another. A young child of five took one look at her forbidding face and burst into terrified sobs.

Hessalam sneered at them. Such sheep! Then she smiled, suddenly. Dismissed all the potential weaves. Instead, she drew Fire – not a web, just an artless maelstrom of raging flames and turned her back upon the crowd entirely in her contempt.

Levelled the torrent of Fire upon Avendesora.

The waxy leaves burst into crackling flame, igniting readily as the fire consumed the foliage. Hessalam attenuated the flame, turning the thermic lance upon the bole of the trunk, intending to do damage the Construct could never heal.

There was a terrible groaning, crackling noise. At first Hessalam thought it was the sound of the inferno that was consuming the tree. Then she saw the paving slabs crack as to her horror and awe, the _chora_ in its torment sought to claw its way free of the Earth, to fight for her life.

The rest of the mighty roaring was the voice of Avendesora. Grating, grinding in awesome wrath and terrible anguish. Hessalam leapt back as a bough thicker than her waist slashed out, a mace of wood trying to crush her to the earth. Constructs like the Nym were terrible when roused, but Hessalam had never heard of a _chora_ walking, let alone fighting.

The square was in utter turmoil. Some of the Dai'shain – the children, mostly – fled. Most of the adult Dai'shain and none of the _gai'shain_ did. Instead they ran to the tree with water in pitchers and buckets. Those that had neither threw themselves upon the flames, desperately trying to extinguish them with their bodies. Some sought to interpose their bodies between Avendesora and Hessalam. In its distress, the _chora's_ writhing branches blindly struck down Aiel. Others, the fires claimed, _cadin'sor_ clad figures kindling like torches.

Hessalam was badly frightened, now. The charred tree, a blackened engine of destruction was grimly hauling its way out of the ground, churning taproots gouging a crater as it struggled for purchase. The damage she had done to it was fatal, but Avendesora wasn't dying quickly enough. It meant to take Hessalam with it. Instead of the aura of tranquillity and peace it had exuded, the smoking behemoth daunted her with a malice very nearly as strong as Compulsion.

Desperately, she released the torrent of Fire that was barely holding it back, and the _chora_ surged forward like an avalanche, a grinding lurching horror that would crush her under a hundred tons of scorched timber. With a scream of anger and fear, Hessalam threw out her arms and a bar of pure white light stabbed out into the heart of the noble Tree.

The bole of Avendesora exploded as Hessalam's Balefire tore it asunder. Where the lance of Balefire struck, the wood just ceased to exist, its thread erased back in time. Further out from the impact the terrible heat shattered the heartwood, boiled the sap, the detonation unleashing a wicked shrapnel of razor sharp splinters into the crowd of Aiel. Pitilessly, Hessalam sawed the bar of balefire right through the trunk, and Avendesora died, a violent end to a gentle life.

Hessalam's ears were ringing as she watched the smouldering ruins of Avendesora collapse into its pyre. The few Aiel that remained were standing mute, watching, bereft of purpose, broken beyond rue or tears. Someone was screaming, one lone voice, monotonously keening until she ran out of breath, then starting again.

Hessalam looked down in surprise, hackles rising. It was the former _gai'shain,_ who was kneeling, screaming her lungs out in horror and shouldn't have been possible, not this deeply under Hessalam's Compulsion. _Unnerving._ With a glare, and a chop of the hand, Hessalam bade her be silent, and thankfully, her thrall fell quiet and was still.

Hessalam reached out with the Power, forming the weaves for a Gateway that would open a half-mile's easy walk from the Seven Towers of Malkier. She was done here, for now. "Follow me" she bade the _gai'shain_ , curtly, an afterthought.

The Forsaken stepped through onto the chalky dirt of Malkier, her Compelled heeling her like a hound, without so much as the conception of doing otherwise. Behind them, the Gateway snapped shut, falling like a guillotine blade, leaving only death, destruction and despair where once things lived and grew and were glad.


	21. Chapter 21: Down at the Bottom of the We

**Chapter 21: Down at the Bottom of the Well**

Darkness was an old friend.

It came intermittently between white-hot jolts of searing pain. Between the endless, repetitive questions that wore away at him like rainfall upon exposed bedrock. Sleep without dreams, without consciousness. What tenuous grasp on the passage of time Rand al'Thor once had was long gone. He might have been here days, weeks. An Age, for all he knew.

In one of his brief lucid periods, he heard his captors moving a prisoner into the cell adjoining his own. The jailors addressed his new neighbour as "High Lord."

Whatever this fellow's supposed crimes, they were treating him much better than Rand, that was for sure. No visits by the Seekers. And it seemed they provided him with a liberal supply of alcohol, judging by the man's incoherent and drunken ramblings interspersed with snatches of ribald song that Rand overheard. His repertoire ranged from the picaresque to the downright bawdy, sung in a cracked tenor.

Mostly, though, the poor fellow just wept, hopeless, racking sobs, monotonous. Wrapped up in his own plight, Rand just wished the luckless royal next door would just do them both a favour and shut his face. He had enough troubles of his own.

Awake, his body shivered with fever, an ague burning him up like tabac in his clay pipe, wreathing him with a phantasmagoria of images and impressions, a cloud of smoke overlaying reality.

* * *

Rand was back on the slopes of Shayol Ghul, scrabbling like an insect up the treacherous slag-heap of shifting shale, clambering over jagged shards of igneous rock. _On the heights, the paths are paved with daggers._

The wound in his side had broken open once more, and his blood soiled the finery of the red silk coat overlaid by the writhing sinuous form of the twin Dragons rendered in sunburst gold that marked him true. He looked to his right, then his left for Moraine and for Nynaeve, but there was nobody there for him. He was alone.

Above him, pressing down upon him was the raw stuff of Chaos itself – a sky of boiling pitch struck through with silver, fell blades of steel, a cyclonic thunderhead that consumed itself. The Dark One himself, the World Serpent. An ouroboros, coiling sinuous and thick-thewed about the Wheel of Time itself, consuming his own tail in his endless insatiable hunger.

On the top of the spoil heap, as Rand craned his head to look up, a lone figure waited for him, uncaring of the magnitude of the forces that swirled around him as he capered under that madding sky. There was a clothyard of Power-wrought steel in his right fist, raised defiantly at that torment of uncreation roiling overhead that could buckle mountains, boil oceans. _Moridin_.

His face was set in a familiar, prideful sneer. "Come up!" he bade the Dragon Reborn. His face was eager. "Come and see! All the little kings, their conceits laid bare. All the patchwork lands laid out like a gleeman's coat. Come up, and look upon it for the last time!"

The Dragon's breath laboured in his lungs. Sweat slicked the copper of his hair as it hung in front of his eyes. With an effort, he turned, and looked down, at the blood-spattered path he had dragged up the mountain, but he could not see what Moridin saw. Instead, the foothills of Shayol Ghul far below were banked in a shadow his eye could not pierce and for an instant, his heart quailed within him. How could he fight when he could not even see the things he laboured to protect?

Then Rand gritted his teeth and turned once again to his task. One step, then another. The strake of the mountain he climbed was dizzying, impossibly steep. His left foot slipped, suddenly, a spray of small stones he dislodged falling, clattering seemingly endlessly, and Rand felt a lurch of vertigo, wanting only to press himself to the ground until the dizziness passed. He fought the craven urge, knowing that if he gave in to it, he would never climb to the top, but would huddle here until the World broke and was riven under him.

 _There is one rule, above all others for being a man. Whatever comes, face it upon your feet._ Lan had taught him that.

Suddenly, he was astride the world, on a roughly circular patch of ground on the summit, under the eye of the storm. There was enough room for a duel on the precipitous roof of the world, and Moridin watched him carefully, despite his disdain for the forces of obliteration that coiled about them, above them. _He wants to die, forever, but not to lose_ , the Dragon thought.

There was steel in Rand's one good hand, the sword of the Treekiller king, the ivory of its hilt pressing gently against the heron-mark print on his palm. As a youth, with Mat, he'd gone wranning, shinning up trees to rob bird's nests. He'd found an early-born baby wren, once, cupping it in the hollow of his hand as it fidgeted and chattered quietly for its mother. Now he held the sword with the same delicacy and precision.

With only one arm, he could not be Moridin's equal in strength. That did not matter. He would bend like a Two Rivers longbow, but he would not break.

They circled, counterclockwise, Rand's blood tracing the arc of his movement, a Rohrsach picture drawn by a delicate hand as their motion compassed the gyre of the storm. Moridin smiled coldly in greeting. An old friend, an old adversary.

Moridin attacked! Pent stillness to flowing motion in an instant. The waveform collapsing into quanta of light and dark. Hawk Spots the Hare. Rand blocked, allowing the weight of Moridin's strike to brush his blade aside and he flowed with it. Cat on Hot Sand, and he extended the blade as to threaten Moridin's throat, a deceptively slow riposte that Moridin barely avoided. Kingfisher Strikes in the Nettles.

Rand tracked Moridin with the extended blade. Hummingbird Kisses the Honeyrose, and the Betrayer of Hope desperately struck the blade from him. Why was Moridin so poor an adversary? Before, Ishamael had been his match, and with only one hand, Rand should be easy meat. Instead, the Dragon drove Moridin before him. Leaf on the Breeze. The Viper's Kiss.

Plucking the Low Hanging Apple became Leopard's Caress, Rand's blade viciously twisting Moridin's sword from his hands. Putting the tip of his blade to the Forsaken's neck, Rand backed him up, simultaneously kicking Moridin's fallen sword away from him. It spun clattering away, falling over the edge of the precipice. Moridin stood with his back to the cliff's edge, with nowhere to go.

Ishamael was still smiling that mordant smile. As if he didn't much care much about the outcome. Ignoring the imperative of Rand's sword at his gullet, he contemptuously turned his back, opening his arms wide as if to girdle the whole world.

Down below, Rand saw the Earth as Moridin had. There was the Stone of Tear, Tar Valon, and the Towers of Midnight. The fastnesses and strongholds of Man mere castles made of sand against the tsunami wave of _aven'kal_ cresting above their heads, ready to fall on that shoreline and eradicate even their memories. The inevitability of the Dark One's victory. The Wheel broken at last, and hope ended. All petty concerns unravelling, lives now arrested, as all eyes were drawn to Shayol Ghul and the impending apocalypse.

"Your plans fail because you want to live, madman" said Moridin. His voice was choked with some strong emotion, but his gaze was hooded like a hawk's. "For my part, I am content. The Great Lord said he would let me die. Forever."

Rand shook his head. "He is the Father of Lies. And you are a fool to believe him."

Ishamael turned back to Rand. There was something unutterably destitute in his eyes, and for an instant, Rand saw Elan Morin once again, a sensitive, yearning soul. One who had mourned for every sparrow that fell. Then Moridin drew his comforting madness back around him once again, and Elan Morin was banished. There was no weapon in the Forsaken's hand, nor did he hold the One Power, and yet he laughed in scorn, and his words were prideful.

"What I love, I destroy. What I destroy, I love."

With a shiver of foreknowledge, Rand found himself speaking the familiar words along with Moridin, words that Lews Therin Telamon, the Lord of the Morning once uttered, as if it was a catechism they both observed.

 _For Lews Therin, they were words steeped in despair. He saw again Ilyena Sunhair, dead at his hand, the nimbus of her hair's glory sullied by the dirt of the ground she sprawled upon. Plaster dust had fallen on her where she lay, her elfin-fine features etched with an agony of denial, horror and fear._

 _He had broken her with the Power like a porcelain doll, her spine snapped by wrist-thick flows of Air he himself had wielded. She had soiled herself. Death had stolen from her every dignity. With revulsion, Lews Therin saw her grey eyes were sere, filmed with the dust that coated everything already, as the ground undulated underfoot, the aftershocks of the earthquake that was inexorably shaking the palace to pieces about them, turning it into a morgue._

 _It was her blood staining the hem of the long grey cloak he wore, where it had dragged upon the ground. The walls cracked, gilt flaking from the soot-streaked murals on the walls, chunks of stucco falling from the ceiling._

 _He had seen all that Ishamael had intended him to see, as the Betrayer of Hope ripped from him the madness that had blinded him._

 _The Healing with the True Power had been a torment, but sanity's curse as he looked upon what he had wrought was worse, far worse, as he gathered his wife's broken body into his arms, as if the warmth of his own body, the immediacy of his terror and sorrow could make her live again. He smoothed the hair back from her brow, moaning in horror as he saw his grimy hand dragged a filthy residue of half-dried blood and dust across her alabaster skin. What had he done? Her glassy eyes stared back at him, frozen forever in terror._

 _Ishamael looked down upon him with ineffable contempt, an elegant figure robed in sable, his neck ruffled with a fall of white lace. With a frown, the Forsaken used his white-gloved left hand to brush at a speck of dust that had marred the sleeve of his garment._

 _The_ Nae'blis _had taunted Lews Therin in his extremity, not for Ilyena and his children, but with the loss of his power and authority. "Once you stood first among the Servants. Once you wore the Ring of Tamyrlin, and sat in the High Seat. Once you summoned the Nine Rods of Dominion."_

 _Had Lews Therin really cared for those things? What were those things to him now? Dross. Nothing, and less than nothing._

 _In his overweening pride, Lews Therin and his Hundred Companions had tried to seal the Bore with_ saidin _alone, and the Dark One's counterstrike had corrupted_ saidin _utterly. He and the Hundred at the Bore were the first to be affected, and the worst-contaminated by the Dark One's viscid essence. Driven insane by the pestilence coursing through them as they channelled the corrupted Power. They hadn't stood a chance._

 _And Lews Therin? In terrible anguish of spirit, his mind unhinged, he had done the worst thing imaginable. He had retained enough semblance of who he had once been to crawl his way home to die, like a dog crushed under the wheel of a cart. A rabid hound, with poison in his foam-flecked jaws._

The memory was etched like acid upon the shattered soul of Lews Therin. Ishamael, the Betrayer of Hope was no longer a man in his eyes but a terrible revenant stalking his thoughts, his waking dreams. The words of Ishamael ignited an awful, killing rage in his mind. An all-encompassing balefire that saw the whole world only as kindling for Ilyena's pyre. And his own soul as the torch to light it.

But he was Rand al'Thor as well as Lews Therin Telamon, and it was not Ishamael – spoiled, prideful and lost – that he addressed but Elan Morin Tedronai. As if compelled, Moridin echoed him and their voices together rose young, strong and clear, ringing out over the whole world. Lews Therin's words, but imbued with a different meaning.

 _I killed the whole world, and you can, too, if you try hard._

Dreadful words. Words of prophecy and doom. Rand al'Thor saw something unlooked-for rise in Moridin's eyes. Something monomaniacal in its intensity. It imbued the Forsaken with a titanic force, and for the first time in their confrontation, Rand took a backward step before him, suddenly mortally afraid.

To the Dragon Reborn, it felt like Moridin's strong hands had wrested from him both authority and power. The mountaintop shuddered beneath their feet, the ground pitching, heaving like the Sea of Storms, and Rand was cast down from the heights. The last thing he saw was Moridin's seraph smile, imbued with a terrible majesty.

The Dragon fell, and far.

Darkness ruled.

* * *

The Seekers After Truth were patient men. Compassionate. They didn't get angry, no matter what Rand said to provoke them in the extremity of his pain. They implacably asked their questions, Seanchan voices that were both soft and slurred but clearly intelligible at all times. The questions themselves never varied: Where is the Forsaken, Moghedien? Where is the Darkbox that she stole? How do you unlock the crystal _ter'angreal_? What is its purpose?

The Seekers were almost solicitous in their care. After all, he was of the Blood, as they accounted it, Ishamael having been Artur Hawkwing's advisor upon a time. They referred to him as High Lord, couched their questions delicately, bowing and observing _sei'mosiev,_ refusing to meet his eyes out of respect for his elevated rank. They were, after all, _so'jhin,_ even if they were the property of the Empress herself. Their courtesy was impeccable, and their professionalism exemplary. And they hurt him. Light, and how.

There were many ways to put a man to the question without drawing his blood, and these Seekers, with their half-shaved heads and raven-tattooed shoulders knew most of them that did not require the use of the One Power. They had shocked him with electric eels. Broken and mangled his fingers with thumbscrews so he could never draw a bow nor wield a sword again. They had chained his arms behind his back, suspending him from the ceiling for hours at a time until he thought his arms would tear from their sockets, his own body weight slowly suffocating him, compressing his lungs. So many ways. And always Healing available, to enable them to continue their mistreatment unabated, provided by cold-eyed _sul'dam_ and obedient _damane_.

Thus far, they withheld the worst from him, knowing that the fear of it would work on him, rendering it more efficacious. Branding irons. Hot coals placed on a man's bare belly. Somehow, he held out. In this, he was helped by the fact he _wasn't_ Moridin, and therefore couldn't answer many of their questions. So giving up Elayne and the secrets of the _cour'souvra_ would not end his torment.

Thankfully, the Seekers hadn't known of the one thing that would have broken him quicker than anything else. The box, where he'd been imprisoned by Galina Casban and the rest of Elaida's Aes Sedai. But as he huddled in the corner of his cell, shivering, clutching his knees to his chest and nursing his shattered, splintered fingers, Rand knew that he couldn't hold out any longer. He would have to flee into _Tel'aran'rhiod,_ if he still had the strength, hoping that in his absence, the Seanchan would not break the mindtrap and thereby kill Elayne.

Now, the bugger next door was singing. Slurring his words. Drunk as a weasel once again.

" _I'm down at the bottom of the well,_

 _It's night, and the rain's falling down,_

 _The sides are falling in, and there's no rope to climb,_

 _I'm down at the bottom of the well…."_

This was followed by a hollow, excoriating laugh, and then a report, as glazed pottery met the side of the cell wall with a crash. "Hey!" the disembodied voice next door yelled stridently. "More bloody wine in here you lily-livered goat-botherers, you!"

Rand sat bolt upright with a start. He recognised that voice. _Mat?_

What in the Light was Mat doing here?


	22. Chapter 22: The Girl And The Grey Mare

**Chapter 22: The Girl and the Grey Mare**

It was the work of a moment for Rand to slip from his cell into the realm of shadows. In _Tel'aran'rhiod,_ he could not feel his body's pain. He had known this. It was a temptation. First, slip into the World Between the Worlds… then cravenly flee his captivity altogether. Leaving Elayne's _cour'souvra_ in the hands of a Darkfriend Seanchan Emperor.

In the shadow realm, the intervening cell doors between himself and Mat opened with a touch, and the rooms were illuminated by some unseen light, unlike the pitch-darkness their real-world analogue was steeped in, as if the viewer's unconsciously-expressed desire to see his surroundings provided the necessary light. That was how most things worked here.

There was, of course, no trace of his friend in the cell he occupied in the waking world. People weren't permanent enough to leave an imprint upon the World of Dreams. Rand supposed there was a moral in that somewhere.

Mat's cell was proportioned exactly as his was, with much the same dearth of contents except Mat's had a mattress and a frayed coverlet, which Rand eyed with a degree of covetousness. He sat down upon the floor facing Mat's rude pallet, and concentrated upon learning the room. This was markedly easier than learning a place back in the real world, for some reason, taking a matter of bare moments. Then he concentrated his Talent, willing himself through to Mat's cell.

He knew he had arrived when he was once again steeped in darkness, and as if to compensate, his nose was assailed with the vinegary odour of stale spilled wine and mouldy bread.

His sudden arrival appeared to pass unnoticed by Mat, who Rand could barely discern as a huddled form at the end of his bed. The shapelessness of his mass indicated he had drawn his blanket around him for what protection it offered from the unremitting chill. But Mat's hearing was as keen as a fox's, and when Rand coughed, his friend's head jerked round in startlement, challenging him gruffly. "Who in the hell are you, and what do you mean by creeping up on a body like that?"

"Mat, it's Rand…" his unwanted visitor began to explain, a trifle sheepishly.

"No, you're bloody well not" Mat retorted shortly. "For the first thing, Rand al'Thor is dead, as the whole _flaming_ world knows, even here in benighted Seanchan. Laid in state, public funeral, lots of touching eulogies. Lots of credible witnesses including Aes Sedai, who cannot lie…."

"Ah, Mat, since when's a small matter like that ever stopped an Aes Sedai deceiving someone?"

Mat appeared to run out of steam, his silence acknowledging the truth in Rand's words. But he was nothing if not a born barrack-room lawyer. He rallied quickly. "Secondly, I know his voice, and you're not him. Thirdly, …

I'm not playing this game, stranger. I grieved my friend once, and I take _bloody_ exception to somebody trying to game me pretending to be him. Locked-room mysteries in this day and age are not the puzzles they once used to be. There are plenty of unpalatable alternatives explaining how somebody could pop up in my cell unannounced that have nothing to do with the Dragon Reborn. Most involving the Power.

Either you Travelled in here, or you are a Myrddraal who just popped in to visit via the nearest shadowy corner, or maybe another bloody _gholam_ who slipped under the door. Myrddraal don't stop for a chat, and they don't sound like people anyway. _Gholam_ like to play with their food, but I doubt one would show up to try and convince me he's the Dragon Reborn. Conundrum solved, and you're welcome.

Hey, if you _are_ a _gholam_ , give my regards to your friend, who I shoved off a Skimming platform into an eternal abyss. I wish I could say I'm sorry about the matter, but the truth is, I walked away with a song on my lips. Anyway, whoever you are, kindly sod a long way off, and leave me in peace. I have a hangover, and no wish to rehash old times."

"Burn me, Mat!" Rand expostulated. "How do you expect me to prove who I am? You're right, I don't have Rand's voice – nor his body or face for that matter. After I defeated the Dark One, as you know, I carried Moridin's body out of Shayol Ghul. That's the part that makes no sense to anyone who knows the story.

There was no earthly reason for me to spend my last strength rescuing one of the Forsaken. In truth, Moridin's body was alive but his soul was extinguished. My body was dying, but my soul was still within me. As Flinn reported, both bodies were dying – mine from my wounds, and his because his spirit had already fled. The Prophecies, Mat, wouldn't be satisfied without my body on the ground. But there was a link between him and me, and it allowed my soul to take his body. A shell-trick, like the ones Thom used to dazzle us with, but this one done with the One Power…"

"You know, I'm hearing a lot of words" Mat interrupted, "but the important ones appear to be: 'I'm wearing the body of the Forsaken, Moridin, otherwise known as Ishamael the Betrayer of bloody Hope'. You know, I heard my guards talking about themselves about another prisoner here who just so happens to be a Forsaken. Well, I guess that's you.

If there's one thing a Shadowsouled likes doing, besides plotting, torturing and murdering, it's hearing the sound of their own voice. That and lying. Well, you can save your breath to cool your porridge! If you _are_ Moridin, then I probably can't make you leave. Can we at least skip the chitchat and get to the point where you artfully despatch me with the Power. Because, to be frank, this place is giving me the pip."

"Whoa, Mat!" Rand interjected. "Easy. Look, ask me anything. I'll prove to you I am who I say."

"Well, if you are one of the Forsaken, you must have a pretty good working knowledge of the formative years of the Dragon Reborn. Places, names, .. I suppose you could have gone to Emond's Field and Compelled a bunch of people to give you the goods. All the kind of stories that give a character depth…. I suppose the only safe questions are going to be stuff only the two of us – Rand and I – know…. Why as a little boy were you afraid to paddle in the pool at the foot of the Winespring Water?"

"Because there was a big old pike, and I didn't like the way it looked at me. When I was in bed, trying to sleep, I'd get nightmares of it trying to bite off my toes."

"You could have guessed that. Why did we trek out to the Luhhan Farm on Sundays?"

"Because Alsbet Luhhan put her fresh-baked pies on the windowsill to cool off, and you were always convincing me to help you rob one."

"Sure, everyone knew that story. .. What was the song we used to sing that you said reminded you of Wil al'Seen?"

Rand puffed out his cheeks, trying to remember. Wil had been one of the boys they had grown up with that had a roving eye and a smooth tongue, a handsome lad that had no trouble at all charming the girls. But the song was lost somewhere in the vaults of memory.

He could remember the bridge of the tune, Master al'Vere picking out the chords on a battered concertina, the shimmer of Egwene's braided hair a dark chestnut by firelight against the polished copper and pewter tankards hung behind the bar. Something about a girl and a mule. Wait, that was it!

" _Young Roger the Miller came courting of late,_

 _To a farmer's young daughter, called beautiful Kate._

 _She had for her fortune many fine things –_

 _Beautiful silks and gold, diamonds and rings –_

 _Her Father he gave her a neat plot of ground,_

 _She had also a fortune,_

 _She had also a fortune of five hundred pounds._

 _Well, the money and supper they both were laid down,_

 _And it was such a sight to see five hundred pounds –_

 _The sight of that money and beauty likewise_

 _Made Roger's heart greedy, and dazzled his eyes –_

' _Now that your daughter and money are here,_

' _Tis I would not have them,_

' _Tis I would not have them without the grey mare!'"_

Rand realised that this was the first song he had sung since occupying Moridin's body nearly two decades ago. His voice was rusty, but the lilting, mocking rhythm carried him through the staves and he grew in confidence and volume. He hadn't realised how much he had missed singing. How cathartic it was!

Rand shook his head, wondering at his obtuseness. For a level-headed fellow, he could be remarkably dense at times. Had he not heard the Song of Growing? That was what the music _did,_ it brought you out of yourself, lowered your inhibitions, allowed you to grieve. It was a sharp sword that clove to the heart.

Mat snorted incredulous laughter. "If you are a bloody Forsaken, then you've certainly done your homework. You even get the same bits wrong, and you're singing is irredeemably crap, as his always was." Lustily, he joined in the third verse.

" _Well, the money and supper were taken from sight,_

 _And likewise young Cathy, his true heart's delight –_

 _Young Roger was taken and shown out the door,_

 _And ordered not for to come there anymore –_

' _Twas then he did tear out his long yellow hair,_

 _Saying, 'I wish I had never,_

 _I wish I had never spoke of the grey mare!'_

 _Well it wasn't six months, they were over and past,_

 _And Roger the Miller, he met with his lass –_

' _I think I do know you then, madam', said he,_

' _Well I am the same way with you, so!', said she –_

' _A man with your features and long yellow hair,_

 _Well, he once came a-courting,_

 _He once came a-courting my father's grey mare!'"_

Mat was left to carry the tune, which he did with a will, as a lump rose in Rand's throat, and tears coursed down his cheeks unchecked, unashamed. The grieving that had been left unfinished, even after Merrilor. It seemed to him he felt the familiar grain of the ash-wood of the bar top, comfortable under his elbows, planed level and worn smooth by generations of toiling hands taking their ease.

The Winespring Inn had the reassuring _solidity_ of hundreds of year's tenure, a cavern of river rock where the flames of a hearth fire had been tended for generations, its cellars cool where Bran al'Vere stored his tun barrels of brandy. Older still, the foundations all that remained of the Kingshold of Manetheren, dating back to the Breaking of the World.

It might be a place for shepherds and plough-hands, an unassuming hearth for plain folk to take their ease, but that familiarity did not breed contempt. For it was also a place of shelter in hard times, with weapons laid in store against the day they were needed. A place where justice was done under the Light. In its way, Rand reckoned, it was as grand as any King's hall, as enduring as an Ogier stedding. Its roots ran deep.

In the same way, while this was only a memory, a recollection – not a vision or a Foretelling – it arrested him with its immediacy, its presence. Rand could almost see the rosin fly from Abell Cauthon's fiddle-bow like motes of amber as he double-stopped, punctuating the music with rhythmic chords, Bran hunching over the concertina, cradling it against the spotless white of the apron covering his ample chest in dove-tailing hands with an unexpected delicacy.

An instant that was somehow eternal. A motif of the Pattern itself, a recurrent theme rising and falling within the cadence of the Music.

"' _Well, it was not a-courting the grey mare I came,_

 _But you, my young jewel, my Cathy by name –_

 _I never thought your Father would ever dispute,_

 _To give me the grey mare with you to boot –_

 _And after he's losing a dutiful son,_

 _Oh, 'tis now I am sorry,_

 _Now I am sorry for what I have done.'_

' _For your sorrows, young Roger, I've little regard,_

 _For there's many a man in this town to be had –_

 _If you'd forgot t'grey mare, you'd be married, y'see,_

 _But now, you have neither the grey mare nor me! –_

 _The price of that grey mare was never so great,_

 _So fare you well, Roger,_

 _Fare you well Roger, your sorrowful state!'"_

Mat was like a burr under your shirt! After the conclusion of the song, he always muttered something in Rand's ear, just to needle him. The gist was always that the girl in the song – proud, rich and full of herself – reminded him of Egwene al'Vere. To the accompaniment of Rand's scowl at the slighting of his betrothed, he was wont to expand upon his theme. "Miss al'Vere is going to be a Wisdom one day. If you expect her to want or need your opinion, you've another think coming. You or anybody else. Mark my words, she's never going to find the time for a husband, or settling down. So snatch your kisses while ye may, Rand."

Rand thought about it in sorrow. Mat had been more right than he could possibly have known. Egwene had become Amyrlin, which amounted to being Wisdom for the entire _world._ Her short life had burned with greatness. And now she was dead, fallen protecting her flock from a terrible predator. Mazrim Taim. M'Hael.

Rand wondered how much comfort that brought Bran and Marin in their grief. Did the pride they doubtless felt make up for all the things she had missed out on? That they missed? They never got to see their daughter married, with children of her own. They did not even have a body to bury.

All that remained was a pillar of crystal on the Polov Heights where her Flame of Tar Valon had consumed her in negating M'Hael's Balefire. Rand had seen it. It stood fifty feet high, perfectly transparent and seemingly colourless. At its core was frozen Vora's _sa'angreal,_ a fluted white rod of ivory.

Twenty paces uphill from it, opposing, there once stood a roughly man-shaped crystal. The winds had snapped it off at its base, and its trunk had rolled downhill to rest at the foot of Egwene's statue. It was the only memorial the battle needed. Good had endured, where Evil had not. Egwene left no mortal remains. But she left a _legacy._ The Song continued.

" _Now Roger's away to his desolate home,_

 _And he sighs as he sits there and sobs all alone –_

 _And Cathy, she's married, she's happy and gay_

 _To a wealthy young miller who works the long day –_

 _So lads, when you're courting, be always aware,_

 _For to court with the young maid,_

 _To court with the young maid – and not the grey mare!"_

The song ended, and Mat sighed contentedly. "It would have gone better with a dram of Master al'Vere's best brandy, or a pipe of Two Rivers tabac, but it wasn't half-bad. No, you are no Forsaken. When it comes to the real bits of life, they just don't _get_ it. And that's not something you can imitate.

I believe you. Not because you know the words, but because you know the _song._ " Mat whistled slowly through his teeth. "A neat trick, that, Rand al'Thor. Faking your own death. Tell me this. Who was in the know? Because for bloody sure, _I_ wasn't."

Rand sighed, heavily. "Elayne, Min and Aviendha, obviously. Moraine and Alivia, who helped facilitate it. Look, Mat, I'm sorry I didn't tell you. There wasn't time, plain and simple. I intended to find you afterward, but that's not the way things turned out."

"So, Alivia the _damane_ got to know and I didn't? Light, but that makes me feel so much better." Mat groused.

"Look, Min had a prophecy that Alicia would help me die. So we decided to trust her with helping us fulfil that figuratively, in order that the Pattern did not decide to interpret the Prophecy with her _literally_ killing me. It didn't even involve the Power. She helped put together some things for me to take with me when I left."

"Well, what about Min then? She never told me anything about whether you were alive or not. But I _do_ know you never did return for her either. I saw her pass her days in a kind of hopeful expectancy. Every time she answered the door, I saw a shadow cross her face. Disappointment. As if she always expected it to be someone else. You. And now I know why! Burn you, Rand al'Thor!" Mat expostulated angrily, "really? All those years. And you didn't show? Not once?"

"I couldn't, Mat." Rand replied heavily. " _Couldn't._ The Prophecies said I had to _die._ Before the Last Battle, I thought I wouldn't survive the confrontation with the Dark One. It was only close to that time that I came to understand that there was a chance. A chance that even _you_ wouldn't wager on, but the whisker of a possibility that I would survive _Tarmon Gai'don_. I didn't have the luxury then to work out what that might mean.

And after…? Well, at first, I sort of expected I'd be able to pick things up with Min, Elayne and Aviendha, muddle things together. Then it came to me. No matter how clever I was, how well I hid it from the outside world, me being in their lives would change _everything_. I couldn't do it."

"Really, Rand? Because from here, it looks a whole lot like running away from your responsibilities. And I'm an expert, so take it from me, that never ends well in the long run." Mat replied. "I was a slow learner, but I got there in the end. I think. Mostly. But honestly, I'm amazed at you. You had the balls to give _Shai'tan_ the Light's truth to his face, but _not_ to face married life?"

"Mat, you don't know the half of it! Aviendha had a prophecy that Foretold the destruction of the Aiel people at the hands of the Seanchan – not to mention the conquest of Andor and a whole slew of other horrible things. It was all bound together with the Dragon's Peace, and you know what? My _blood_ was the ink on that document.

Think about it for a minute. Just one example, I'd still be the _Car'a'carn._ Any question that Aviendha had that concerned the Aiel, she'd have to bring to me. All three – yes, even Min – are the fulcrum on which the balance of order, sanity and stability of the Age rests. Seanchan, the Aiel and Andor. Do you think that's some sort of accident? _I_ don't.

Do you want to know what _I_ think, Mat? I think the Dragon Reborn's wives symbolise the World itself. And he was meant to die so the World could live. I _can't_ mess in with that business, Mat. I _daren't._ Not for my happiness. Not even for theirs.There's only one chance at avoiding Aviendha's prophecy coming true, and that requires me to stay dead."

"Uh, Rand" Mat began hesitantly, and then faltered. His voice was filled with a terrible gentleness Rand could hear. As if Rand was some frangible object, and Mat's words were a hammer that could shatter him like Sea Folk porcelain. "I think you'd better sit down. I have something to tell you. About Min."


	23. Chapter 23: A Place In The Garden

**Chapter 23: A Place in the Garden**

 _There's a place in the garden, you go when you're happy_

 _A place in the garden you go when you're blue._

 _And you sit by my side, in the shade of the willow,_

 _Your head on my shoulder, my arms around you._

(composed by 'The Alan Kelly Quartet'; appears on the album "Small Towns and Famous Nights.")

Moghedien was frustrated and tired when she finally found what she was looking for. Her neck had a crimp in it from ceaselessly looking over her shoulder, scanning her back-trail as she picked through the Barrowdowns – all that was left of the great city of Harad Dakar.

Once, it had been the capital of Hardan, a nation that had occupied the lands between Shienar and Cairhen. Those lands were now fallow. The Barrowdowns was a windswept moorland falling away north and east where the River Erinin ran swift as a millrace in a narrow gulch, cutting westward.

On paper, the Erinin demarcated the border between Arafel and Shienar. But there were few people in these lands either south or north of the river. The Kingdom of Hardan had been little more than a placeholder by the time the Great Winter War swept over it, and the remnants of her people had fled the contesting Andoran and Cahiernin forces who came with sword and fire.

Hardan had been abandoned entirely. Over the years, crofters and shepherds had quarried the stone from the city to build their drystone dykes and their homes, and in their turn, their scattered hamlets had been deserted in the lean years when the Blightborder moved south and Trollocs and other things hungrily stalked the land. Now the foundations of Harad Dakar, buried under the chalky soil, were all that remained.

The raised ridges of earth at least afforded Moghedien some shelter from the knifing wind, and the lash of the rain. But they were a labyrinth, concealing what she sought. It had been long since she last came here, learning the area well enough to Travel here, should the need arise. Though Moghedien had never needed to use the Portal Stones, it was useful knowledge. Now she wished she had not chosen to Learn an area so far from the Henge itself as she fruitlessly sought the standing stone.

The day had worn late ere she found what she sought. The Henge was a circular column of grey stone standing twice the height of a person. The Portal Stone was granite, so old the wind had weathered it, eroding and pitting the ancient symbols carved upon its sides, its top rounded, uncomfortably phallic.

Frowning, Moghedien wondered at what point the erosion damage the stone suffered would render it unable to work. The standing stones had been old when she was young, in the Age of Legends, and their founding had been forgotten. In an age before Travelling had been discovered, they had been built as a network to connect far-flung places, the vertices of a series of azimuthal ley lines that girded the Earth.

Imagine their builders' surprise when they discovered that the Henges did far more than that. They connected to other Mirrors of the Wheel, other parallel worlds that were in some way analogues to this one. The Portal Stones raised more questions than they answered. Most of those worlds were depopulated, without any sign that there had _ever_ been people – and yet in all these realities and possibilities, the Portal Stones on all these worlds had sprung into being, been activated simultaneously as far as anybody could ascertain.

Reluctantly, Moghedien dug into her pockets, hunting for the Darkbox. It felt slick to the touch, warm, with the disquieting sensation that her fingers were slowly sinking into the surface. A jumble of dissonant impressions and sensations poured through her mind in a cascade, before the familiar ones asserted themselves. Numinous dread. Darkness. Fear. A taste of what it had been like to stand before Him at Shayol Ghul. Yes, it was Him.

The Lord of the Grave spoke as soon as the connection had been established, overwhelming her with his imperative.

FIND THE SYMBOL OF A TRIANGLE WITHIN A CIRCLE STANDING UPON ITS BASE. PLACE YOUR HAND UPON THE SIGIL AND CHANNEL A FLOW OF SPIRIT INTO THE HENGE, UNTIL IT SENDS YOU TO THE PLACE I WISH YOU TO GO.

THERE, YOU WILL BE MET BY THE ONE I SENT. GO WITH HER, AND DO AS SHE BIDS UNTIL I SUMMON YOU AGAIN.

NOW GO.

With a start, the Spider released the Darkbox from her hand, dropping it upon the ground. Hastily, she stooped and swept it up again with an involuntary shudder, stuffing it into her pockets, trying to minimise the time the _ter'angreal_ touched her bare skin.

It was but the work of a moment to find the requisite symbol, and Moghedien placed her palm upon the rough surface of the granite. The rain-wet rock was cold and clammy to her touch, and then it felt as if her fingers were pressing through that surface impression. Beneath, the rock felt oily to the touch, glossy and slightly warm. The symbol seemed to tingle against the flat of her hand, responding to the Power within her.

Unhesitatingly, she drew Spirit, touching her flow to the surface of the Henge, a thin flow because she did not know what quantity was required. _Nothing._ She drew more, and more still. Outside the Oneness, anger coruscated. Anger and fear. She was drawing at near her full capacitance and she was one of the strongest female channellers in history, and still the amount she was using was insufficient. Clearly, you needed an _angreal_ to use the Portal Stone safely!

Moghedien drew more, until her skin seemed to crackle. Her palm grew hot. There was pain, like a stitch in her side but suffusing her whole body, and the day's fitful light seemed to pulse, to wax and wane. Stronger and stronger, polarising light, so it seemed that what she saw flickered between the image and its inverse as a silhouette. White against black. Black against white.

Flicker….flickerflickerFLICKER,.. flicker, flickerFLICKER….

She saw the Strid as the wave of the Breaking crashed over it, water spilling out as one side of the land rose and the other dropped away, strewing the meadow's contents – trees, animals, buildings – like _sha'rah_ pieces scattered by an angry hand, the ground surface beginning to crack and founder like the skin on soup in the pan, before being swallowed into the lava beneath. She saw faces. Her father's. Lews Therin. Ishamael. Mistress Shanan.

…flickerflickerflickerFLICKERFLICKERflicker

A riot of images and impressions, too quick to parse for meaning. Heat and light. And then the Henge rejected her, a bolt of electricity arcing into her, tossing her to the ground like a ragdoll. The copper tang of blood in her mouth, the smell of ozone. Gingerly, she pulled herself to her feet.

* * *

It had worked. Or at least, she thought it had. She was standing in a field of barley, beside another standing stone. It took her an instant to work out her location. Jehannah. Across the hedge, the high road to the Ghealdanin capital, little more than a broad cart-track of tamped dirt.

Only, this wasn't her world. Everything felt… off. As if this Mirror of the Wheel was an unfinished piece of metalwork, burrs and jagged hooks down to the finest increment of matter. As if the whole place recognised her difference and wanted to hurt her. To draw her blood.

She sought the _ko'di_ for its clarity _._ Everything, from the grains of barley, to the crawling insects, to the very stones and earth itself all thrummed with the same malign resonance, a million million harp-strings of human gut wound tighter and tighter. Lines of black running away into infinity, like those that had connected the male Forsaken to the Great Lord that allowed them to channel without going mad.

A whole world slaved to the Lord of the Grave.

And she was not alone. She felt an oppressive presence at her back, like the shadow of an eclipse racing hungrily over the surface of the Earth, consuming the Light.

Slowly she turned around.

Facing her stood a dark, cowled figure, emanating a forbidding force. Moghedien saw that the very crops appeared to be aligning like iron filings to a magnet, the stalks bending in obeisance, ley lines that swept about the dark figure and the standing stone. The creature cast back her concealing hood in greeting, revealing a familiar face. One that the Spider had never wanted to see again, in this life or the next. _Semirhage._

The dark woman sculpted her face into a welcoming smile. "Hello, Moghedien."

* * *

The willowy woman reached forward to cup Moghedien's hands in hers. The Spider suffered the unwanted familiarity of her touch woodenly, schooling her face to remain neutral. Opaque. Semirhage was skilled at reading people, knew Moghedien's dislike of unsolicited intimacy. It was a deliberate act. A display of dominance from the charcoal-skinned woman, a statement of precisely where the balance of power lay between the two of them. Semirhage enjoyed inflicting pain, asserting her primacy. It was who she was.

The Mistress of Pain was elegant, clad in a confection of black _streith_ that clung suggestively to the line of her angular frame, so artfully that it appeared to meld with her flesh. Her hair was cropped uniformly short, in arrogant assertion that the beauty of her face needed no further adornment. Her full lips appeared to blush, the depths of those sumptuous black-within-black eyes appearing full of tenderness as she gazed down upon Moghedien.

"My dear" Semirhage cooed, her voice husky, a pleasing alto. "I simply _had_ to come and receive you myself. I understand that in your world, you were _Nae'blis._ There, the Dragon Reborn might have prevailed, but you remained standing, the last of his Chosen. That merits respect.

For one, I am not surprised. Others may have underestimated you. I never did. Here, it is I who am the Great Lord's Regent upon Earth. He has overcome the Dragon, Moghedien, and soon you will hear His words for yourself."

Moghedien forced herself to ignore that she was grimy with dirt and sweat. Discomfited by the taller woman's invasive physical presence. Beside this statuesque creature, she felt diminutive, unlovely. Plump and plain.

Her eyes widened. _Were_ they truly her thoughts, or was she under Compulsion? Semirhage lightly brushing across her mind using the True Power? Reflexively, she reached for _saidar –_ and recoiled.

She could feel the Power, but the blazing sun of _saidar_ was a brooding red giant. Sickening, ailing. Scabbing over it, the Taint – a suppurating crust over a festering wound. This was worse than _saidin_ had been in her world by all accounts. There, at least the Power had been hale underneath the surface of the contagion. A man just had to reach through the corruption of the Taint to seize it. Here, the Power itself was sick, dying, rotting!

Moghedien shuddered in horror, recalling how intimate an experience channelling _saidar_ was in her world. Like being one with strength, youth and life. Using _saidar_ here would be like lying with a rotting corpse. She had nearly _touched_ that…!

Semirhage's smile widened. "As you may have discovered for yourself, trying to channel _saidar_ here is .. inadvisable. The Great Lord tenders his protection from the madness and rotting sickness to his Chosen here, much as I understand he did for the male Chosen in your world. Has He not granted you the same favour here?" Semirhage asked solicitously, shaking her head sadly as she saw the wordless reply in the Spider's eyes. "Oh. Too bad. Maybe He will in due course. The rest of the milieu have to bear the taint as best they can, until they are no longer fit to serve. Then they are usually despatched, though some of the stronger ones, or ones with useful Talents are leashed using the _a'dam._ They may be incoherently insane, but as long as the Leash Holder has a grasp on her own sanity, all is well."

"And what of the men?" Moghedien asked, numbly.

"Ah, much the same. They run mad, too, in due course but we do not try and control them with the Domination Bands. The male _a'dam_ is an imperfect creation. Over time, the man gains increasing control over the linkage… did you know, the Domination Bands are a much earlier, more primitive precursor of the _a'dam_? Or that their creators were none other than Lews Therin and Latra Posae? … Alas, the insanity seeps through the link to the Leash Holder with the Domination Band, which defeats the whole point of the exercise. No, men who begin to lose their minds are quickly killed before they run amok. The Great Lord has no intention of allowing another Breaking of the World to happen here."

Moghedien nodded, licking her lips. "I see." She forced her voice to be deferential, ignoring the icy ball of anger and fear in the pit of her stomach. "May I ask why He sent for me?"

Semirhage laughed, lightly. "As to that, I cannot say. The Great Lord has not seen fit to divulge his intent to me. So I cannot share it with you. I was instructed simply to meet you and – not to put too fine a point upon it – entertain you with my hospitality. He would take it gravely amiss were you to go astray – and I would be quite upset should you attempt to try to slip from my charge." Semirhage informed her pointedly.

Moghedien's fertile mind conjured up a vista of terrible possibilities. Rooms of glossy, sterile white. Medical trays laden with tools. Cannula, stents, scalpels, tweezers. Beds with leather restraints. The harsh artificial glare of bared neon glowtubes. Some of these thoughts must have crossed her face, because the dark woman only increased the wattage of her slow-burning smile.

"Never fear, my comrade, I intend you no harm. I shall treat you with honour until the Great Lord sends for you, or until he sends his avatar to meet with you here."

Moghedien felt like a mouse between the paws of a cat. She was backed into a corner. She needed allies, support, but she was alone. The only person she could trust was herself. _Wait, that was it,_ she realised, in a flash of brilliance. There was another Moghedien, another her, in this mirror of the Wheel, was there not? A potential collaborator, even a friend, a sister!

Then the doubts came. _Could_ she trust another version of her? Would this other Moghedien see her as another her, or just another possible antagonist. She bit her lip, considering. The answer was stark. She couldn't. She herself trusted nobody because she projected her own capacity for treachery and ruthlessness upon others.

If this new Moghedien and her were truly alike, the other woman would be untrustworthy by definition, and would understand Moghedien to be equally conniving. And if they were dissimilar in that regard, then they _weren't_ interchangeable. Her double would be alien to her. Another stranger. Either way, it amounted to the same.

Feigning diffidence, she questioned the Lady of Pain. "How is my alter here? I must confess, I would be very curious to meet her."

"Ah, my dear," Semirhage replied, blithely. "I regret that the Moghedien of this world did not survive the Last Battle. You know, I do believe that if she yet lived, you may not have been able to access my world via Portal Stone in any case, according to the theory expounded in the 'Mirrors of the Wheel'.

Your lives may have contained different experiences, but the Pattern does not permit the duplication of a soul within the same Mirror. But that's by-the-by" Semirhage continued briskly. "The Chosen that remain here are but few. Rand al'Thor proved a capable adversary here, as well. Those yet living are myself, Mesaana and Demandred..."

"So you three were allied together as you were in my world?" Moghedien interrupted.

A flicker of a frown – irritation at being spoken over – crossed Semirhage's face. "Yes, only here, Moridin joined _our_ cabal, rather than trying to bend us to his will. The Great Lord determined that he was too unstable to be _Nae'blis,_ and so that honour passed to me. Things went rather more smoothly, once we four pooled our resources and agreed upon a coherent strategy.

Moridin also is still very much alive, though he is somewhat in disfavour with the Great Lord at present. But the rest are no more. Lanfear and M'Hael lived through _Tarmon Gai'don_ , but afterwards, the Daughter of the Night sought to challenge me, and Demandred slew his protégé when he similarly overreached."

Abruptly, Semirhage gestured. A Gateway ripped a screaming hole in the belly of the Pattern, the opening edge scything through the unripe barley. Moghedien hadn't felt a thing. The True Power. Another demonstration.

The _saa_ coursed strongly in the Lady of Pain's eyes, Moghedien noted. Using the True Power was addictive, and it came at a terrible price. It seemed that it was one Semirhage was more than willing to bear. The Spider understood completely. Whatever the cost, power was life.

The Gateway Semirhage opened was broad enough for two to walk abreast in comfort without having to worry unduly about the edges – sharp enough to make razors seem like rolling-pins. It opened onto a riot of Autumn colour. _Curious._ Peremptorily, Semirhage took her hand. "Come" she chivvied. "I have something to show you that I think you'll appreciate."

It took an instant for the Spider to take her bearings. They were in Tar Valon, specifically in the walled enclosure that the _Gaidin_ and their recruits used as a training yard. Only instead of a cobbled courtyard filled with men hacking at one another with wooden swords, the open space had become a wooded arbour, the slender boles of juvenile ash and beech trees rising slender in grace like the dark woman who walked amongst them.

The westering sun, dipping molten over the shoulder of the Shining Walls, painted the day's last benison upon the youngling trees, light filtering through the aurefic Fall leaves, stippling shadows that twisted upon the ground. The canopy of leaves was truly glorious, thought Moghedien, every hue of living yellow from saffron to umber. "Pretty, isn't it?" Semirhage said, possessively, a strange satisfaction in her eye.

"Rather." Moghedien allowed. "I must admit, I am surprised, Semirhage. I never took you for the bucolic type, communing with Nature. I rather remember your predisposition for the sanitary, sterile rooms where you entertained your, ah, _special_ guests."

Semirhage essayed a hurt expression, but beneath it her changeling amusement glittered. "Ah, Moghedien, you cut me to the quick with that tongue of yours. Cannot a woman mellow with age? Ah, but you are right. Even my garden is untrammelled, so darned _untidy,_ despite my efforts." Moodily, the dark woman kicked a drift of fallen leaves. "Yet I find contemplation here, sometimes," she continued pensively. "With the Great War concluded and the Dragon slain, I have the time to seek fulfilment, to perfect my craft. Come! We are nearly there."

They walked on for a time together, hand in hand. Moghedien realised the other woman was singing, softly, a faint smile of reminiscence on her lips. So quietly that Moghedien only caught fragments of her song.

Semirhage's voice was cultured and rich, the refrain a waltz that had been a common tune, once. The ballad had been perniciously popular for a time, and Moghedien had always _loathed_ it. She could almost hear the strains of an accompanying accordion, see the couples dancing, the glasses of wine clinking as revellers toasted. Ghosts from a world long past.

"… _Had you then told me, that sweet summer night,_

 _We walked in the garden, beneath the moonlight._

 _How lovely you are, and I want you so,_

 _Would you have listened? Now I'll never know…"_

Moghedien raised an eyebrow, and Semirhage broke off, with an enigmatic expression on her countenance. Moghedien still could hear the echo of the tune in her head.

The Lady of Pain led Moghedien by a small tarn, whose black depths were inscrutable, lethiferous waters that reflected the pair of women in monochrome. The ground underfoot grew more broken, and the Spider saw that under the dense carpet of shed leaves, a proliferation of fungi and mushrooms grew upon the moist black earth and half-rotten fallen wood that was slowly degrading into the soil.

Their footfalls disturbed a flutter of butterflies – wings a hand-span across a startling chrome yellow edged with black trim – from the ground and the low-hanging branches of the saplings where they had lain in torpor.

Blindly, the insects took flight, wings palpitating, briefly outlining Semirhage in a nimbus of gold before dispersing. Moghedien noted that the cloud of insects, for all the apparent randomness of their motion, did not approach the Lady of Pain too closely. More use of the True Power?

Unfortunately, Moghedien was not exempt from their attentions. One flew directly into her face, before veering tangentially to momentarily tangle amongst her hair, and she slapped at it in irritation. With a frisson of disgust, she saw another had landed upon her forearm, clubbed antennae twitching as it basked, sunning itself, wings slowly opening and closing like an origami flower.

The delicacy of its touch was uncomfortably reminiscent of Semirhage's caress, invading her personal space, making the hairs of her forearm rise in revulsion. Moghedien shook her arm to dislodge the creature, but its purchase on her bare skin was too secure.

Semirhage laughed delightedly. "Yes, my dear Moghedien, it is not natural affection that makes my butterfly favour you. Their olfactory senses are rather extraordinary, you know, and they are attracted by perspiration, among other things. They are attuned to the sugars and salts in your sweat. And I'm afraid, to put it delicately, you are rather .. pungent right now. But I have also engineered my darlings to associate my pheromones with their predators – bats and such – so they give me a respectful berth."

Moghedien swatted the offending insect, dislodging its broken body to fall onto the carpet of leaves. "Since when do you care about butterflies, anyway? And why are there so many of the damned things?"

"Because they are part of my design." Semirhage replied opaquely, not in the least put out by Moghedien's outburst. "And here we are!" she chirruped, as the trees opened up on a small clearing.

At the glade's heart, there was a rectangular space roughly the length and breadth of a labourer's cot, where the ground had clearly been recently turned. The periphery of the marked-out area was distinguished by the colour of the rich loam, a warm chocolate that contrasted sharply with the dull black soil found elsewhere.

At the centre of the rectangular air, the ground appeared to be very slightly raised, like a barrow. It was difficult to be sure because of the proliferation of fungi – thick, liverish slabs, obscenely veined, that reminded Moghedien uncomfortably of human organs – that blanketed the ground. With disquiet and growing dread, the Spider saw that the huddled mass was _moving,_ an almost imperceptible susurration. As if it was _breathing_.

"Semirhage" Moghedien began unsteadily. "What in the Can Breat _is_ that thing?"

"'Come a little closer, said the Spider to the fly'" Semirhage quoted wryly. "Always wanted to say that to you one day, for some reason. See for yourself."

Impelled by a terrible fascination, Moghedien followed Semirhage's directions. Whatever it was would be an abomination that she would carry with her for the rest of her life, the Spider knew. But somehow, _not_ knowing would be worse. Not knowing the form of the horror that dragged her dreams.

Gorge rising, she stepped forwards two careful steps – unwilling to venture within a long arm's grasp of that slumpen mass.

It was a woman. _Had_ been a woman, anyway. Or a small man maybe, judging by the size, lying face-up in a shallow grave that was little more than a scraping in the soil. Her face was so soiled with the dirt she had been covered over with that it took a long moment for Moghedien to recognise the narrow-cheeked profile of a human face. Hair a dishevelled, filthy tangle.

Moghedien's stomach began to roll lazily when she understood Semirhage's design. Those fungi, they weren't just growing _on_ her. They were _consuming her alive._

With an effort of will, Moghedien barely choked down her urge to vomit, to run screaming. Her stomach heaved mightily, twice, before she regained control. She couldn't look away. Whatever scraps of empathy, humanity remained in the Spider's soul wouldn't allow it.

She saw the cannula jacking into the veins of the woman's wasted wrist, the clear plastic of the tubing full of some brown semi-opaque liquid that was being pumped into her unwilling body. Saw the broader tube Semirhage had forced into her mouth, down her airways, flooding her lungs with oxygen even if the exhausted victim no longer had the energy or desire to labour for breath.

That too-sweet smell, slightly musty but not overpowering by any means, just _there_. One of Semirhage's butterflies, circling lazily, came to rest on the woman's pallid cheek, the beating of its wings displacing motes of the grave-dirt.

That was all it took. Moghedien was forced to her knees by the imperative as she vomited explosively, gagging, her eyes streaming with tears. Heaving even after her stomach was empty, spitting strings of saliva onto the ground.

Semirhage just watched her. _Like a pet cat bringing a dead bird for your inspection whilst she studied your reaction_ , Moghedien thought.

Eventually, what seemed like hours later, Moghedien looked up, wiping her reddened eyes. "Who was that?" she asked.

"Not was. _Is._ "Semirhage corrected pedantically. "I have taken great pains to ensure her soul remains in her body, and that her mind remains intact. Insanity is tedious for me, and a refuge of last resort for the afflicted, which I simply cannot allow. I am surprised you don't recognise her, though I acknowledge her appearance is much changed. You truly don't see the resemblance? That's a pity. I understand this one caused you more than a little trouble.

This is no less than our erstwhile Daughter-Heir, and Queen of Andor, Elayne Trakand. I had wished to provide you with her companion in hijinks, the village slattern Nynaeve al'Meara. Sadly, she proved rather more difficult to subdue, and unfortunately chose to die rather than embrace my hospitality. A shame. You don't look happy, Moghedien. I must admit I'm a little put out. I thought you'd be more appreciative of my little gift, of seeing her suffer in repayment for what she did to you."

"Why? How?" Mohedien managed.

Semirhage brightened at the chance to explain her grisly labours. "Our royal patient was once a very beautiful woman. She was also immoderately vain. I found it efficacious to break her by stripping that physical comeliness away from her. As part of her treatment, I would come by daily, and show her her reflection in a full-length mirror of the Power, so she could witness the incremental progress of her putrefaction.

You know, there is a kind of harmony in it, although I suspect it is lost upon her. Fungi are very complex organisms. The mycelium communicate with their surroundings by releasing spores. In fact, they did so when our footsteps disturbed the glade. My arbour, and all that lives in it are one symbiotic network. The trees, the butterflies, the fungi, and particularly Elayne. To aid her engagement with the process, I took the liberty of adding a mild hallucinogenic agent derived from ergot to her nutrient feed. My work is a holistic in nature, treating the patient's mind, body and spirit.

My critics call me the Lady of Pain, which somewhat misses the point. For myself, I always preferred my _cognomen._ Boann. The Restorer. The Reshaper. My true skill has always been the art of keeping people _alive_.

A physician is the only professional who labours knowing that, someday, the patient will die. In the final reckoning, his job has a zero percent success rate. Inflicting torment is relatively facile, but then the patient reaches their limits, and their heart gives out, they die of shock, a stroke, or any one of a myriad other things that occasion death in the face of enduring agony, which I have always held to be a parlous state of affairs. If a doctor cannot cheat Death, he should at least be able to maintain life in the patient against the imperative of simple pain.

Take Elayne here as a case-study. The principal risk of death is through diabetic ketoacidosis. An unfortunate side-effect of the process she is undergoing. Ordinarily, fungi are reluctant to take root on a healthy, living human body. So, I fortified her parenteral nutrition with a saturated solution of dextrose. This, combined with the nutrient-rich soil encourage the growth of these lobed fungi upon the patient.

However, a byproduct of the prolonged overstimulation of her body with simple sugars means her body isn't producing enough insulin any more. So instead, it burns fatty acids. Smell that sweet smell? Just like pear drops? That's a 'ketotic' odour.

I can't do much about that outside of a laboratory setting, only treat the symptoms. Dehydration, tachycardia, cerebral edema, pancreatitis, gastrointestinal perforation, renal failure… And each thing I try to fix creates another problem, another enzyme cascade. So I just Heal her with the Power, rather than try and correct the chemistry further down the chain. The Healing doesn't kill the fungi feasting upon her flesh. After all, they are now part of her.

Then there's hypothermia. Easy to forget about that when you're used to working in an orderly, regulated laboratory setting. But that's how I lost my first patient. Aggravating, and careless of me. That's easy to fix. Standing flows of Earth and Fire to maintain a constant temperature in the growth medium and patient's body…"

" _First_ patient? You mean, Elayne wasn't the only one?"

"Oh, no!" Semirhage assured her. "I wouldn't normally go to the trouble of planting an entire ecosystem for just one person. Unless, say, they had really managed to get under my skin." Semirhage looked down at Elayne and tittered. "If you'll pardon the pun.

Lanfear was that one person, the exception that made me break the rule. I always did detest that preening quim, for all her airs. What was she anyway but Lews Therin's castoffs? Mierin may have thought herself a cut above the rest, but she never quite had the gumption to test me, for all her pride. But they say familiarity breeds contempt. And one day, she unwisely allowed her ambition to overcome her circumspection. That was how she ended up here.

Ambition's a sin only in the weak, Moghedien, remember that. Remember my garden and Elayne here, and remember Lanfear, who is now fertilizer, if you ever think to make a move on me. Lanfear was not negligable, but she proved nowhere near strong enough. And my garden has plenty of room for another."

The sound of voices appeared to have woken Elayne from a dark and fitful sleep, and she stirred, her struggles shaking the loose earth from atop of her. Moghedien could see the blackened, bruised skin of the side of her thigh where the rampant fungi had yet to stake their claim. Gangrene. Necrosis that Semirhage's vile arts were preventing from being fatal.

A bubbling, whistling noise issued from Elayne's mouth, like a kettle on the boil, and Moghedien realised she was trying to talk. But her mouth was shut with some adhesive tape whose purpose was to hold the breathing-tube in place.

Semirhage used a flow of Air to secure a loose corner of the tape, and stripped it from Elayne's mouth with a vigorous jerk. Moghedien's abhorrence was complete when she saw that the adhesive tape ripped away with it Elayne's lips and a ragged flap of her left cheek with it, revealing the death's-head horror of her skull underneath, the ligaments, muscles and tendons supporting her jaw, the bleeding mess of her gums upon which a constellation of tiny hooded mushrooms were beginning to grow.

Ungagged, Elayne let out a pitiful, mewling cry that the Spider couldn't decipher, but evidently the Lady of Pain had more practice. "'Kill me'?" Moghedien addressed Elayne in a chiding tone. "Oh dear me no. You have _weeks_ left yet before the complications become unmanageable."

Turning back to the Spider: "I had to cut her vocal cords and gag her, Moghedien." Semirhage informed her conversationally. "All that screaming, a body can't think. It really wouldn't do. Well, if you don't have any further interest in my convalescent, I think it's high time we headed indoors. You need a bath and a change of clothes. You really are smelling rather ripe, _Lilen._ "

Moghedien bristled like a scalded cat as she snarled back at Semirhage. "Don't you _dare_ call me that name. Not ever, be you _Nae'blis_ or no! Not unless you hold your life so lightly you're willing to hazard it for the mere pleasure of saying a word in spite!"

Semirhage took an exaggerated backwards step, laughing, holding her outstretched palms in front of her in a parody of surrender. Her smile waxed, seasoned with the contempt of her pity. "No need for us to quarrel so, my pretty!" she chided.

Fists clenched, Moghedien started forward towards the Lady of Pain, her blood boiling with pain, indignation and hurt. Semirhage didn't so much as move but the Spider knew the other woman held an arsenal of agonising, incapacitating weaves ready to throw. She didn't care.

 _Anything_ was better than being that child again, terrified, ashamed and hurting. Completely at the mercy of someone who knew none. And then, out of the corner of her eye, Moghedien saw Elayne's ruined body and felt a sudden shard of compassion. Kinship. The emotion was almost negligible, lost amidst the roiling wrath, selfishness and pain, but it was there. A smile of her own began to form, mirthless and grim, and Semirhage faltered a moment.

Before she could think twice, Moghedien reached for the Source. She plunged elbow-deep in the Taint, blistering and noxious, before breaking through to _saidar_ beneath. She had steeled herself to grasp it, but nothing was preparation for trying to channel _that_.

The _ko'di_ shivered and almost ripped away from her as the enormity of that poisoned ocean began to suffuse her consciousness, to overwhelm her. Worse than the _cour'souvra._ The Taint was a thing of the body and the mind. The Sickness was of the soul, and she fought _not_ to struggle with the Power. That was how a woman ended up stilled or dead. She simply had to _accept_ the violation that entailed if she wanted to use it. And she did.

In the brief instant she held the Power, she turned away from Semirhage, dismissively. She had two weaves ready as she turned to Elayne. Wrapped in the coldness of the Void, her voice was emotionless as she spoke to Semirhage's victim. "I am sorry for what was done to you. Your Light has fled from this world, but I hope you find some peace, my enemy."

Then she reached out with the first weave, touching Elayne lightly upon the breast. To painlessly stop a heart was surprisingly simple. Undramatic. The Queen of Andor simply took one final breath, her body stiffening slightly, before releasing it forever.

Moghedien looked down upon the decaying, corrupted vessel that remained after life had departed. Anger skittered across the surface of the Oneness as Moghedien wove Fire.

 _Saidar_ might be perverted, but the flame itself was as bright and clean as the Light Moghedien had spent her life hiding from. So she turned away as Elayne's pyre burned until all that remained was an increment of fine white ash that the light breeze stirred.

 _Now the long day is ending, the shadows are falling,_

 _The meadowlarks calling for me to come nigh._

 _And the evening is nearing, the daylight is dying,_

 _A soft breeze is sighing, a mournful cry._


	24. Chapter 24: The Shrike

**Chapter 24: The Shrike**

The whitethorn bush was a shard of lightning against the sable malevolence of the storm cloud that swallowed the horizon to the dark man's Power-enhanced sight. The downy grey songbird that perched upon its rickety frame cocked his head to track him with his large and voluble eye, enunciating single, precise liquid chirps as he puffed up his breast pridefully.

 _A fellow of few words,_ thought the dark man approvingly. The shrike was a comely bird with his black barring a _shoufa_ drawn up across his face. With his stubby little bill and chubby frame, this made the shrike look cute, rather than intimidating. A small child playing at Aiel.

The thorn bush was the shrike's gibbet. Below where he sat were pathetic puffs of feathers, the broken bodies of other small birds that the shrike had preyed upon. He didn't need huge talons to secure his prey, or a mighty beak with which to slay them. Not when nature had fashioned him something far better.

Quick and subtle, the shrike would latch his claws into an unsuspecting victim, before impaling them upon the long thorns of the bush. There, he could pick them apart at his leisure with his sickle beak, peeling free the meat in strips, tug away at the glossy innards. The song with which the shrike regaled the dark man was his challenge to an interloper, signifying his willingness to fight to protect his obscene larder.

The dark man looked at the little killer with approbation. You had to fight to keep what was yours. To take what you wanted from the strong. "Never fear, little brother," the dark man addressed the bird in a voice like subsidence in a mineshaft. "I am not here for you. I came for another."

The shrike was sometimes called the Butcher Bird in the debased Common Tongue that was the currency of this Age. In an Age long past, it bore another name, in the High Speech. They called it the _demandred._ It was a name his enemies had given to the dark man, but one he was proud to own. It attested to his qualities as a general. Find the enemy's heart, and then render them, piece by piece. Without compassion.

* * *

Demandred was a hard man, and a pitiless, with a hooked beak of a nose and an arrogant carriage, a tall athletic man with an unsmiling gash of a mouth and dead, dark eyes. He was the kind of fellow that people instinctively gave room for, and treated with wary circumspection.

During the War of the Power, he had arranged for the population of two cities – whose leaders had previously slighted him – to be fed to the Trollocs. Trollocs were always hungry, and respect was important. No. Respect was _everything._ Those so-called Rods of Dominion had learned what value he put upon it first-hand.

He had them placed where they could watch the grisly abattoir where the manlike beasts ripped into their still-living victims, day after day until it was done. One of the Rods had refused to look, so Demandred had her eyelids surgically removed so she had no option but to helplessly regard the carnage.

When it was finally over, he had thrown their families to the Myrddraal to be their playthings. And then, when those haughty Rods had begged him for the release of death, he Compelled them instead to live, and cast them out to wander the land in torment. That was the price of Demandred's pride.

* * *

Demandred believed in augury. Only a fool did not. The observant commander watched for the little things, the apparent coincidences that were in fact anything but. They were the resonances of _ta'maral'ailen_ , the subtle building-up of tension in the threads of the Pattern, like a violinist tuning up his instrument prior to playing.

The butcher-bird was a good omen, yet it also served as a warning to temper Demandred's habitual condescension. It reminded him that a little probity was appropriate. The people he had come to visit might be primitives, but like the shrike, they were very much cast in his image. And unlike the little bird, some of them were not negligible in strength.

He drew upon _saidin,_ fashioning the weaves for a Gateway. Rather than proceed to his destination directly, the end-point of this Gateway was a neutral location in _Tel'aran'rhiod,_ an out-of-the way spot in Shienar he had visited once. He released the flows, fashioning another gateway – this one from the World of Dreams to his intended destination. A sensible precaution.

The weave wobbled, refusing to snap into being. What? How could that be? Demandred mastered his irritation, releasing the flows, instead forming another Gateway, this time to his destination's _Tel'aran'rhiod_ analogue. This time, the Gateway opened smoothly. _Good._ So this wasn't anything nasty like a Dreamspike, but somehow these rustics had found a way to ward a place against Gateways. Like so much else in this strange, infuriating Age, Demandred hadn't known that was possible. It didn't matter.

On his swordbelt, to the left of where he kept his dagger hung a case of tooled leather. From it, he withdrew a plain golden rod, the length of a man's forearm, splaying out to a disc at its base, and its complement, a golden chalice in the shape of an hourglass. The smooth gold was glossy, weighty in his hands. Demandred eased the rod into the socket of the chalice. It slid together smoothly before locking with a click the Forsaken felt rather than heard.

The aegis was called Sakarnen. It meant _Retribution_ – or perhaps _Obliteration_ was a more literal translation from the Old Tongue. With the exception of the male half of the Choedan Kal, it was the strongest _sa'angreal_ this world had ever felt. Using it, he could harrow the city of Ebou Dar from the ground with Fire, or entomb it under the Ocean.

Holding the sceptre in his hands was a curious sensation. Typically, _angreal_ felt inert until the wielder began to draw the Power through them. Sakarnen felt eager. Yearning to be used.

Sakarnen was his life's greatest prize. He had taken it from _Rai'lair,_ the Hearttomb, a cavern in the Chasm of Abyrward in the Great Rift of Shara, after he had slain the sceptre's guardian, a full-grown _jumara._ Something even Lews Therin could not claim to have done. With it, he had fulfilled the prophecy of the Wyld, bonding the Sharan people to him – and him to them – with shackles of iron.

With the Sceptre, he had finally become Lews Therin's equal, each with a free nation pledged to them, each with the burden of a mighty prophecy to bear.

 _One day, Lews Therin,_ Demandred thought grimly, _or whatever name you currently hide behind, I will find you, and my blade will stop your heart._

He drew upon _saidin_ through Sakarnen, the tiniest capillary of that vast taproot of Power wrenching open a hole in reality, forming a Gateway between here and the Mol Hara courtyard. Without hesitation he stepped through the doorway, Sakarnen resting in the crook of his left shoulder, his right hand brushing the hilt of his sword by instinct. He paid no heed to the tableaux of sheep's faces, slow-witted soldiers and gawping noncombatants that greeted his arrival.

Releasing the Gateway, he drew deeply upon Spirit, releasing it in a pulse that propagated outwards from him like ripples from a stone dropped in a pond. The titanic quantity of Power he had discharged would have no effect upon the physical.

The tsunami of Spirit simply passed through the walls of the buildings as if they weren't there, without destroying anything. But his weave would trigger any traps at a safe distance. And the pulse of Spirit would also serve as a gigantic Shield. Anyone who could channel would be disconnected from the Source instantly, and the force of the blow on an unprotected mind would render them unconscious.

Those unfortunates nearest the epicentre of the blast would likely wake to find themselves stilled. Permanently severed from the Source. But they would live. It wasn't Demandred's intent to antagonize the man he had come to visit by killing his subjects out-of-hand.

A brief instant passed. Long enough for the Seanchan soldiers to rally. A thrown spear zipped past his head. Demandred gestured, and a buffet of Air tossed the men aside to land in a crumpled heap. They would live, Demandred guessed. Broken bones, sprains, contusions. All part of a soldier's lot.

He strode into the Tarasin Palace, clearing the way before him with hydra-like tendrils of Air that smashed people against the Tinker-bright walls, sweeping away any ragged attempts at an organised resistance before it had chance to coalesce. He was like a giant hornet chewing through a honey-bee hive to feast upon the larvae, impervious to their stings. They could not fight him. Only flee or be crushed.

He swept into the Throne Room. Cat Crosses the Courtyard. He threw a cyclone of Air before him, scattering a confused collection of _da'covale,_ Deathwatch Guards and _damane_ like Autumn leaves. An Ogier Gardener reared up, long axe slashing down. With a snarl, Demandred threw the _alantin_ against a column of carved stone, hard enough to crack it, and bound him to it with hawsers of Air stronger than steel.

It had taken mere seconds. Now the hall was silent, save for the muffled weeping of blank-eyed _damane_ and _sul'dam,_ searching for _saidar_ and not finding it. Not one to take chances, he drew Spirit from the great deluge of the Power coursing through Sakarnen, splitting his flow into a dozen shields which he cast simultaneously at all the channellers in the room. None of them found purchase. Demandred shrugged. He must have severed them all.

Next, he drew upon Air, Fire and Earth, weaving them into a thick, hardened shell that pressed up against the walls, floor and ceiling of the Throne Room. It was a variant of the Protective Cocoon, which should prove impervious to anything short of Balefire.

Taking pause, Demandred drank in his surroundings. Suffused in _saidin_ , sharpened to an acuity few mortals found in their lifetime, his being resonated to the exquisite, martial aesthetic of the newly-constructed hall – a perfect facsimile of the original in Seandar. This was not the Hall of the Winds, the seat of the Altaran kings. The current incumbent of the Throne of the Winds, Beslan Quintara, was a monarch in name only, vassal to the Emperor Mordred, and of no interest to the Butcher Bird.

The Throne Room was a _fidchell._ A gargantuan _sha'rah_ board, its floor tessalated black against white in gleaming marble. Thirteen squares by thirteen, bordered by the goal rows, alternating slabs of green and red jade. The weight of stone above upheld by the playing-pieces, pillars of glossy-hewn carnelian and malachite. Spires, Counsellors, and pawns, whose place it is to hold, move, or die as directed by the gamesman.

 _Sha'rah._ An ancient game. _Daes Dae'mar_ in microcosm, with many ways to achieve dominion. Move the Fisher King onto a square of your colour behind the enemy's rear rank. Force your opponent to move him onto a square of your colour anywhere along the goal row. Or simply annihilate the forces of your adversary in their totality.

Demandred preferred the latter option, but he would take victory by any means available.

Across the hall, facing the Forsaken, the young Emperor sat upon his throne. The Crystal Throne, placed in the central green square of his adversary's goal row. Victory? Or ultimate defeat? Too early to tell.

The throne representing the Fisher King, blinded, belly gouged with a bloody wound, evoked the memory of al'Thor. Forked crimson lightning skittered over the surface of the _ko'di_. Murderous wrath.

That chair, a flawed copy of the original, a t _er'angreal_ whose intended function was Compulsion, induced unswerving worship and complete obediance in those who came before the seated monarch. Foreswept wings of black jet enfolded, the wings of a harrying raven, stooping, and above the blunt, flesh-stripping beak gaped, voracious and insatiable, between baleful ruby eyes.

Demandred, deep in the Void, disdained the awe. Met the eyes of the man in the chair.

The young man with the shaven head looked back at him calmly, apparently unruffled. He hadn't stirred a muscle during the attack.

His inaction was not from fear or indecision, Demandred ascertained. The young man had dispassionately assessed the situation, and correctly determined there was nothing he could do to amend it at present. So he had waited to see how things played out. _A cool one, then. Good. I can work with that._

Now the Seanchan Emperor spoke to Demandred. "If you are one of those so-called _Asha'man,_ I fear you have made a huge mistake in coming here, and putting on this… demonstration."

Mordred Paendrag's lip curled in contempt. "If you came for your own reasons, I can assure you of this. You may kill me, but you cannot run far enough, nor find a hole deep enough to hide from my people's vengeance.

And if Logain Ablar sent you, your Black Tower is doomed. You may have some eight hundred _tsorov'ande doon_ strong enough to wear the Sword and Dragon. My people can call upon _thousands_ of _damane_ to bring an end to your obscenity once and for all."

The Forsaken bristled. "Do not mistake me for one of al'Thor's half-trained 'Guardians' just because I wear a black coat. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Demandred."

Mordred checked himself. _Only a madman, or the man himself would dare claim such a name._ "Suppose you are who you say. I have no love lost for the Forsaken. I have met two of your coven already. One is my captive. Another stole from me, and fled. What is it that you want from me?"

Demandred reached out with the Power, seizing a high-backed chair, dragging it over to him, careless of scraping the antique wood of the chair on the mosaic of the floor. Spinning the heavy seat around, he eased himself into it, lounging back in the chair.

At his ease, the Forsaken used Air to snag a carafe of wine from a small table beside Moridin's throne, and a golden goblet that had ended up on the floor. The soft metal of the chalice was slightly dented, he noticed. No matter. Crossing his legs comfortably, Demandred served himself the wine. He took a sip. Adequate.

Demandred's gaze enfolded the younger man. "You serve the Great Lord. As do I. As do all the Chosen. Sometimes, the servants of the Lord of the Grave overreach, be their station high or low. But the Lord of the Twilight honours his word.

I know that Moghedien stole the Darkbox from you, and fled. Whilst she remains at large in this world, she is – at present – outside the Great Lord's reach. I do not hail from your Mirror of the Wheel, Emperor. I come from an adjoining world which is much like this one, save that there, the Great Lord won, and the Chosen have dominion over the World in his name.

The Lord of the Grave values your pledge, and wishes to make amends for the misdeed of his servant. To that end, He sent me to you, as emissary extraordinary, to bequeath you a greater gift than what has been stolen from you."

Moridin frowned, sloshing the sediment of the now-cold cup of _kaf_ he had been drinking, looking into its depths as if in divination, before his clever eyes locked with Demandred's. "What do you offer?" he stated, simply.

"I can give you Shara" replied the Forsaken gravely. "There, I am known as Bao the Wyld. Their Messiah."

"And what," replied Mordred with an arched eyebrow, "do you want in return?"

"I want Rand al'Thor. The Dragon Reborn."

The Emperor shook his head in negation. "The Dragon is dead, Forsaken. He is not within my gift, if I willed it or no."

"No." Demandred asserted in rebuttal. "He is not dead. He has taken the body of the Chosen, Moridin, to preserve his spirit in the world of flesh. And, as your own words have acknowledged, he is your prisoner, Emperor."

"How do I know I can trust you, Demandred? How do I know you don't wish to contest with me for this world using Shara as your weapon?" the young man interrogated.

But the hooks of the Forsaken's lure had sunk deep. _With Shara, I could conquer the Westlands in a dozen years! Without it, I would never be able to conquer the World within my lifetime, if I lived to be a hundred._

"Because we have the same enemies, Emperor. Because it is the Great Lord's will that I return to my own world, after this mission, where He will reward me for completing my task by naming me _Nae'blis._ Because I have never broken my word. I will broker you becoming _Sh'botay_ of Shara – in perpetuity, as the Wyld's heir. All I want is the Dragon Reborn."

Mordred allowed himself a wintry smile. "And how do you know _I_ will keep my end of the bargain?"

The suggestion of a smile played around Demandred's mouth like the treacherous gleam of black ice. "Because it costs you nothing, Emperor… And because if you should cross me, I will return to this hovel that you call a palace, and rip your lungs out."

* * *

Mordred cast back to his meeting with Demandred. Thus far, the Forsaken had cleaved to his word, but the Emperor was still wary. He knew Demandred was one of the great strategists of all time, and he feared a trap.

In the intervening days, he had read all the historic accounts of Demandred that he could access. By repute, the man was overweening, famously cruel, and vauntingly proud. But he was a bluff speaker, and he was apparently a man of his word, striking true to the letter of the compacts he made, if not always to their spirit. If one could believe three-thousand-year old accounts of his life, that was.

The woman beside him on the raised dais was the _Sh'botaan_ of Shara, a wisp of a young woman, who dimpled prettily under the translucent veil that covered her face. Yseult Chalinda Cour was the titular absolute monarch of the isolated empire. She would rule for seven years, and then she would die, and her consort would succeed her, becoming _Sh'botay,_ whereupon the cycle would repeat.

The Sharan people interpreted the seven-year tenure of their monarchs as the Will of the Pattern. In actuality, it was the female Ayyad that were the true power behind the throne. The female channellers ensured the timely death of the figurehead ruler, ensuring they never accrued any real power to themselves. Distasteful as it might be, it was with these _marath'damane_ that he would have to strike the real bargain.

The compact he had thrashed out with the Sharans was that the Seanchan Emperor would become the _Sh'botaan_ 's consort for seven years before succeeding her as ruler. … That was the easy part. Surviving beyond his seventh year as _Sh'botay_ would be the tricky bit.

Mordred looked over towards the half-dozen dark-robed women who nominally formed a guard of honour to his spouse, catching a fractional nod from Galbrait and Shendla, the latter of whom had been Demandred's concubine. Dangerous women. Where they led, the rest would follow.

Still, what he was about to accomplish thrilled him. Shara might be a single nation, but it was larger than the entirety of the Westlands put together. Nearly the size of the Seanchan continent, it was a discrete landmass to the east of the Aiel Waste, segregated from the rest of the continent by a mountain range and the Great Rift. It had been secluded from the rest of the World by the Breaking, its eastern shore rendered nigh-impassable by the tumultuous Morenal Ocean.

Annexing Shara into the Seanchan Empire would put him on the same legendary footing as Luthair Paendrag. It would also redress a great historical reverse, the greatest defeat the Seanchan Empire had ever known.

It was a history long supressed in Seanchan that Artur Hawkwing's eldest daughter Laerelle had been sent with three thousand ships and a quarter of a million soldiers to quell the mysterious eastern kingdom. The huge force had sailed east, then south before disappearing out of history.

Few knew that the invasion force had made landfall on Shara's stormy East Coast, their sails filling the horizon. They had been the first aliens to set foot on Sharan soil for two thousand years, an armoured cavalcade that drove deep into that unwelcoming land, the natives fleeing before the river of steel.

None had lived to witness the Sharan counterstroke that had sundered the Seanchan force. They only heard from afar as the battle raged deep inland, an endless rolling of thunder as _damane_ strove against the Ayyad. The great river the Seanchan forces had followed inland ran crimson with blood, and those stationed to guard the ships trembled, knowing that in the hinterlands over the horizon, their army foundered.

The river dried in its bed, the immense watercourse dammed upstream, fouled by Seanchan corpses, ere the dike burst, carrying the grisly, bloated carcasses of men and horses downstream. It was then that they knew there was likely nobody left alive for them to bear away. Yet the sailors staunchly refused to abandon their posts. Artur Hawkwing had taught them that duty was iron.

On the third day, the Sharans had come. The troops guarding the invasion fleet clinging precariously to the shore had _damane_ numbering in the scores. They were no match for the linked circles of female Ayyad that came for them. And lightning and fire struck from the skies that the _damane_ could not anticipate, and men muttered in superstitious fear, knowing that they were being hunted by men who could channel.

It was a battle of the One Power, not of men and steel, and it was desperately unequal, even before a Great Circle of seventy-two broke open the sky, and heaved up the Ocean, hurling the invasion fleet upon the shore to wreck and founder. It was a struggle without pity or quarter. No plea could be heard above the crescendo of the waves and the boiling of the sky, above the pounding of lightning and fire. It was thus that Laerelle Paendrag's fleet met its end.

A lone ship, a lean and noble _raker_ taken from the Sea Folk and rigged for speed, had been all that escaped the disaster, running ahead of the storm. Its complement of sailors, starving and maddened by thirst, had been the only ones to return to bear tidings to Artur Hawkwing of his daughter's death and the loss of his armies.

In anger and grief, Hawkwing had them put to death, knowing that the knowledge of such a cataclysmic defeat would destroy the reputation of his Ever-Victorious Army and embolden his enemies everywhere. No, better that it was believed that they had fallen from the edges of the Earth or been destroyed by the caprices of the Ocean!

And now he, Mordred Uthair Paendrag, Second of His Name, was about to gain at a stroke what his famed ancestors could not. For him, it would only be the beginning!

He allowed himself to savour the moment and what it represented as the ceremony ended, before walking over to Galbrait and her Ayyad. There was much to discuss. He might not be _Sh'botay_ yet, but he did not intend the next seven years to be fallow. He had much to discuss.

* * *

An Aiel always veiled himself before he killed. A custom stronger than law, a reminder of the shame of abandoning the peaceful Way of the Leaf. It was the principal thing that separated an Aiel from the ways of the Wetlanders, that and the refusal to use a sword. A spear was a tool for hunting. A sword was only for murder.

But an Aiel didn't need a _shoufa_ to hide his shame, any more than he needed the _cadin'sor_ to conceal his form when he hunted. The black robe he had taken fulfilled both functions for Muradin, as he allowed the heavy cowl to cloak his face in shadows.

The back of the robe was a little sticky with the blood of its previous wearer. Muradin had driven a long, thin-bladed knife up through the man's kidney into his heart from behind. A quiet death. The man he had killed had been one of these Ayyad, a man who used the One Power as a weapon in battle, so what he had done was not murder. He was an enemy combatant.

Tales had come to the Shaido of what men like these had done at the Last Battle. The _Samma N'Sei._ Men who channelled, who had broken every covenant. Aiel who had abandoned _ji'e'toh,_ who gloried in killing with their faces bare to the world.

One Power or not, the Ayyad had died like any other man. A muted cough of surprise, and then he fell. The pain and shock ensured it was a quick and clean death, the other man unable to cry out. Muradin had caught him in his arms as he sagged and eased him to the ground. There was very little blood. Another advantage of this method of silent death.

Muradin stood within two score paces of his intended target, the _da'tsang_ Uthair Paendrag, who now called himself Mordred. He eased a short, perfectly-balanced throwing-knife into his palm. The range was extreme, but he thought he could make the throw. He didn't mind waiting till Uthair came a little closer, either.

He was under no illusions. He would die in the attempt. There were too many guards, too many _damane._ That didn't matter. He would meet his _toh._ But it was the best chance he was ever likely to get. Mordred's back was a big target as he conferred with these Sharan Wise Ones. He could hear snatches of their conversation as he eased the blade of the knife between thumb and forefinger, ready to throw. He froze as he realised what he was overhearing.

The Sharan woman was speaking "… more than ready to … plans already in motion to deal with the Aiel, even before this alliance was proposed… strong forces ready to be dispatched via gateway to all the Aiel holds known to us ….. interrogation of pedlars that pass through.

… Yes. Alcair Dal, Cold Rocks, Mainde Cut are among the places made known to us…. sent male Ayyad disguised as pedlars to these places, to learn them for Travelling…"

Mordred's brash voice was raised in interruption. "..We will send forces into Malkier to finish the Taardad Aiel there. Without the Aiel, there will be no Dragon's peace. Without that, the Westlands will fall apart into infighting, as they always have, and we can divide them up amongst us piecemeal. …"

Carefully, Muradin eased his knife back under the voluminous sleeve of his habit. _Toh_ to the Aiel nation outweighed his own need for retribution. And killing Uthair would not end the threat to his people posed by the Sharans. He needed to warn the Aiel. Not just the Shaido. _All_ the Aiel.

With the greatest of care, he eased himself into the background like a wraith, and departed as if he had never been there at all.


	25. Chapter 25: The Steeplechase

**Chapter 25: The Steeplechase**

The race had begun at noon, under a crisp and cloudless sky. The molten sun overhead did little to warm a cold, dry day chased by a brisk wind. Aviendha smiled knowingly as she saw the two protagonists come into sight, labouring over a small rise.

The young man on horseback was first, of course. The Wise One watched him crest the hilltop, the horse's stride lengthening appreciably as he began down the gentle gradient. He passed by a large boulder that was once a field-marker from a time before Malkier had been swallowed by the Blight, and Aviendha began counting as she watched the diminutive figure of the runner pick her way down the scree slope in pursuit. She stopped counting as the young woman passed the marker. Thirty seconds and change.

The race had been one of numerous contests organised by the Aiel clan chief and al'Lan Mandragoran, King of Malkier, a series of friendly competitions to capture the imagination of the young and hot-blooded amongst both peoples, and to offer youthful pride a more wholesome outlet than quarrels, brawling and duels. It had been many hundreds of years since the Aiel had lived cheek-by-jowl with another people, ally or no.

The young man on horseback was al'Akir Mandragoran, the eldest son of Lan and Nynaeve, named for the father Lan had never known. He was a handsome youth, inheriting his mother's chestnut hair, which he wore long, tied back by the leather braid of the _ki'sain._ The craggy handsomeness of his father's face was tempered by Nynaeve's softness of line, but there was nothing soft about the Borderland winter of his grey eyes, or the determined set of his jaw.

 _If he grew up among my people_ , Aviendha thought with a chuckle, _he would be a Stone Dog for sure!_ There was a great deal of unflattering banter between the Aiel warrior societies. Stone Dogs were not noted for their fleetness of foot, but they were always the shield covering every retreat, vowing to die rather than flee.

The young _Far Dareis Mai_ running against the Malkieri Prince was Aviendha's daughter, Shaiel. In many ways, her mother thought fondly, she was the most similar to her in face and form as well as temperament amongst her siblings. Shaiel was tall and slim, with a temper as fiery as her hair. She would be a strong woman once she learned what Aviendha had struggled to learn. Not to be goaded by her pride. Not to make a hubris out of meeting _toh._

Aviendha watched her run, fierce joy filling her heart. It was a joy tempered with loss. Her battle with the Forsaken, Graendal had left her right leg crippled beyond Healing's ability to restore, and she now walked with an almost-imperceptible limp. It had been a hard battle to accept the injury, and not see it as a loss of _ji._ But Aviendha missed being able to run, feeling the wind in her hair.

The race had begun two hours ago, and it was entering its final stages. Shaiel had led for the first fifty yards before the big bay caught her and passed her, to the loud acclamation of the Malkieri crowd, and since then the horseman had pressed his lead, leaving the Aiel woman labouring in his dust.

The racecourse marked out had encircled the city, a steeplechase that wound over a flat and dusty plain before crossing a narrow bridge of stone across the river and into a series of low hills overlooking the City, before returning to the plain once more, re-crossing the river on the other side. Five laps of a seven-mile circuit over rugged terrain.

The young horseman had pushed his mount hard, leaning over the saddle, banking as big a lead as possible. A good horse could cover a mile in a minute and twenty seconds, flat-out, and the bay the Prince rode was reckoned to be better than good by those who knew their horseflesh. At the halfway point, he had forged ahead by nearly half a lap – fifteen minutes to the good. Yet the gamblers amongst the Malkieri still found Aiel willing to take their wagers – Andor wine and Illianer steel bet against skins of _oosquai_ liquor and gold 'liberated' from the Stone of Tear. They knew, as Aviendha did, that an Aiel on foot was favourite over these longer distances. People were better suited for aerobic work, better-equipped to deal with heat exhaustion than horses.

The cool conditions and the undulating terrain had favoured al'Akir, but Aviendha knew that the reckless young man had thrown away that advantage as he had sought to maintain an unsustainable pace. A little over three and a half minutes a mile, a pace that no human could live with over the shorter distances. For two laps, the great steed had maintained the pace. After that, it was all about holding on.

* * *

Al'Akir dug his heels into the ribs of his steed, urging one last effort. The headwind blew dirt from the arid ground up to sting his skin and cake the sweat-lathered flanks of his horse, as he adjusted his dust-veil that covered the lower half of his face, his mouth and nostrils, so he did not choke on the grit. Aldazar responded gallantly, but the Malkieri knew by the bellows-labour of his lungs and his foam-flecked muzzle that his gelding had reached the end of his strength. "Just a little longer, my eagle" he incited his mount.

He risked a look behind. The young woman had closed the gap between them to just over two hundred yards, still running smoothly. If anything, she had picked up her pace as she closed in on her labouring quarry. Up until now, the Aiel girl had pounded out the leagues with metronomic regularity, four and two-thirds of a minute per mile.

Now, Shaiel was pressing hard as she reeled them in. There was just over two miles left to run, the course over this final lap deviating onto the high-road into his father's walled city, winding up through the three concentric rings of fortifications to finish in front of the Palace where the Seven Towers of Malkier reared.

As soon as the hooves of his mount struck sparks upon the stones of the highway, al'Akir kicked his feet from the stirrups and nimbly vaulted from the horse's back, hitting the ground running. It was no part of his plan to ride his blown horse to death.

Shaiel passed him within twenty strides, her face as impassive as the _ko'di_ , showing neither tiredness nor triumph. The mark of a champion runner, not wanting to fatigue her body by fighting through the unnecessary tension of strong emotion. Al'Akir concentrated on his breathing, finding his rhythm, his long legs matching hers stride for stride as he focused his gaze upon the back of his _cadin'sor_ clad opponent. Nothing mattered except staying with her.

The sides of the road were lined by hundreds – no, thousands – of excited spectators, both Aiel and Malkieri, caught up in what they were witnessing. Al'Akir tried to block out the noise of the baying crowd. Shaiel was winding up her pace, gradually accelerating, trying to break him. Four-and-a-quarter minute mile pace. He clung on like a limpet to a rock. _She's been running for the past two hours! If it's hurting you, it must be killing her._

They passed under the City Gates, still inseparable, buffeted by the noise of the throng, which redoubled in the confined space of the narrow, winding streets. Shaiel kicked hard, a burst of acceleration that drew her two yards clear, then five, then ten as al'Akir fought to respond, shutting the door again. His lungs were burning, legs stinging with the lash of lactic acid.

She went again as the road grew steeper, and the Aiel watching yipped their acclaim, and al'Akir doggedly clung to her like her shadow as they passed under the second gate. Shaiel accelerated a third time, with the conviction of an unbeaten champion who knew nobody could live with her pace. But somehow al'Akir found the strength to match her, as the Malkieri roared him on. "Come on, Longshanks!" some shouted. " _Tai'shar Malkier!_ " " _Carai al'Cair Carahar!_ For the honour of the Golden Crane!" yelled others. " _Al Chalidholara Malkier!_ For the sweet land of Malkier!"

He drew abreast with the Aiel woman as they passed under the third and final gate, in a crescendo of noise that drowned out even the hammering of his heart in his breast, the rush of his blood in his ears, as the course finally stopped climbing and flattened out. They could both of them see the finish up ahead, less than a quarter-mile away, at the end of a long and broad street.

Al'Akir had tunnel vision. Nothing mattered except the finish line, a strip of cloth held taut between two of the race marshals. They were both sprinting, flat out, side by side. He knew that glancing to his left to see if the Aiel girl was ahead would break his stride, and almost certainly cost him the race. He had eyes only for the finish line. Al'Akir only knew he had won when he breasted the tape, feeling the slight tug of the fabric against his chest before the marshals released it to flutter to the ground.

He sank to his knees, lungs gulping in air. Somebody handed him a skin of water, and he upended it over his fevered brow, gasping as the shock of the chilled water hit him. He weighed the skin, still half-full and gulped a mouthful of water gratefully. He looked up and to his left, where Shaiel stood, chest heaving, hands on her narrow hips. Disappointment and pain were etched on her face.

With an effort, he pushed himself to his feet, and offered the Aiel woman the waterskin. She grimaced reluctantly, before accepting it. Unless you were blood enemies, you always accepted the gift of water. She sipped at the water, birdlike, not gulping it down as he had, taking care not to spill any, al'Akir noticed. Her thirst slaked, she handed back the skin. "Well run, wetlander" she allowed, grudgingly "you and your horse had the beating of me between you. It was clever. Setting such a fast pace to run the finish out of me."

Al'Akir smiled apologetically. "My father has told me many tales of the prowess of the Aiel." A statement that diplomatically skirted the fact that much of al'Lan's hands-on knowledge of the Aiel had come from fighting them during the Aiel War, Shaiel noted. "He said that no horseman or man afoot could match an Aiel for endurance. I thought maybe splitting the task between the two might give me a chance."

Shaiel coloured to the roots of her hair. "I have much _toh_ to my people. Perhaps they should have chosen another to run in my stead."

Al'Akir shook his head. "Say you not so, Shaiel. I aver you gained great honour _,_ both for yourself and your people. You lost by a single stride against a fresh competitor after running for over two hours previously. And I am accounted the swiftest athlete amongst my nation."

Shaiel glowered. "What would a wetlander know of _ji'e'toh_?" she demanded of him.

"Most would know less than nothing" al'Akir admitted. "The son of _Aan'allein_ would hope to know a little more than most. What I know for sure is nobody in Malkier will ever forget the day a girl of the Taardad Aiel nigh ran a Malkieri prince and his horse to death!"

* * *

Aviendha watched the two competitors wrangle with the hint of amusement in her smile. Unless she missed her guess, the barbs of Shaiel's injured pride were but the thorns of the _segade_ blooms she saw in her daughter's eyes. And there was genuine candour beneath the smooth words of _Aan'allein_ 's son. He was a canny young man. Perhaps Shaiel would teach him to play Maiden's Kiss one sultry night! A fine game for the young and the bold.

Once, a lifetime ago, Aviendha would have been scandalized at the thought of an Aiel taking up with a wetlander. Of course, back then, she had been as Shaiel was now, wedded to the spear, believing she desired nothing more than the joy of battle and the comradeship of her spear-sisters. Heh, but that was before Rand al'Thor had turned her life upside-down!

Shaiel had been born with the ability to channel manifesting in her so strongly that from birth, she was able to use _saidar,_ holding the Power in her every moment, awake or asleep, imbibing it with her mother's milk. She had mastered its control at an age where her peers were learning to toddle and talk. But for Shaiel, _saidar_ came as naturally as breathing. And _Light,_ but her daughter was strong in the Power. Stronger already than Aviendha, as strong as Lanfear had been, and still growing in might. One day, she might equal her father's strength, or even surpass him.

The Wise Ones were applying constant pressure upon Shaiel and upon Aviendha that she become a Wise One's apprentice. Instead, Shaiel was as wild as Aviendha had been at the same age, hunting the wights that crawled out of the Blight.

She used the Power as a weapon, too – as naturally as her spears and her knife. That had been anathema, once. But then the Shadowspawn were an exception, and the Seanchan little better than _da'tsang._ Still, Bair, Melaine, Amys and Sorilea among others railed at what they saw as her wasted potential.

Aviendha had advocated for her daughter's right to make her own life. "Shaiel is but seventeen" she argued. "Plenty of time for her to choose her own path. With the Power in her so strongly, she may live many centuries yet. And you need not be concerned over her control of the Power, as you might for some potential Apprentices. I daresay, she exceeds even some of us."

Sorilea had replied with candour, her words ruthless. "What about the needs of the Aiel? With things as they are, we may need her strength in the days to come. And what if she takes a Trolloc spear in her gut in the meantime? What then of her potential?" the old woman had laid out the facts, dispassionately, unapologetically. "No, Aviendha, the time is coming when she too must put off childish things for her good, and the good of us all."

Aviendha had balked. Becoming a Wise One was, in its own way, every bit as dangerous a path as becoming a Maiden of the Spear. Perhaps more so. She thought of what she had seen among the glass columns of Rhuidean. A hellish potential future for the Aiel people. The Wise Ones had planned and laboured to avoid the events they had seen. Yet, inexorably, it felt to her as if what they had seen was the Weave of the Pattern, a web that entangled them all the more, no matter how they struggled to free themselves.

Friction between the Aiel and the Seanchan continued to increase, the Seanchan barely holding to the letter of the Dragon's Peace, seeking any pretext to inflame tensions. Seanchan irregulars openly raided into Aiel-held territory, under the pretext of protecting their borders.

It seemed as though the Raven Empire wanted to be free of the Dragon's Peace, but did not want to be seen as the ones who broke the concord in the eyes of other nations. No, they wanteda fig-leaf of modesty. Something that the nations of the Westlands could use as an excuse to turn a blind eye when the Seanchan went to war with the Aiel.

Sorilea had come to Aviendha that morning with terrible news. Somebody had attacked Rhuidean, and destroyed _Avendesora._ Aviendha still could barely credit the reports. _Avendesora_ had been permanent, in a way that even the Aiel people were not. It had been with the Aiel before _ji'e'toh,_ while the Aiel still held to the Way of the Leaf. Its destruction was a blow to the heart. A dolorous stroke to the Aiel, whose fate, the Wise Ones believed, was inextricably bound up with that of the Tree of Life.

Sorilea intended to Travel there to assess the situation. She had wanted to take Shaiel to accompany her, partly because the young woman was strong enough in the One Power to open a Gateway and Sorilea wasn't.

The second reason was more pertinent. Sorilea didn't intend to force the young woman into becoming her apprentice. Instead, she wanted to confront the younger woman with the reality the Aiel lived with. To show Shaiel the price of her independence in a world where the Tree of Life itself could be burned from the ground.

Aviendha sighed. The old woman had the right of it, she decided. Tomorrow, Shaiel would leave for Rhuidean with Sorilea.


	26. Chapter 26: A Bee's Wing

**Chapter 26: Sei'mosiev**

Tuon watched a tired bluebottle fly battering futilely at the thick glass of the round skylight set in its bronze frame.

The hamlet of Shon Klear preferred corporal punishment over custodial sentencing. A pragmatic approach to small-town justice. It did not even have a prison. Only a stocks and a gibbet in the town square. Instead, she was incarcerated in one of the town's more robustly-constructed buildings. The Mayoral Palace had been the fief of a dynasty of High Lords that had begun from humble origins as seafaring merchants.

One of the previous tenants had chosen to remember his family's beginnings, dressing the building with white oak and teak to imitate the cabins of a seagoing vessel. These portholes, too, had been his affectation.

The fly ceased its restless motion, resting on the lip of cast bronze, and Tuon looked down with disinterested eyes at the linen dressing swathing both her wrists. Three days into her imprisonment, she had attempted suicide with the knife she had been provided for cutting her meat. The gashes she had succeeded in opening were deep and wept profusely. Now they radiated a kind of cold, sere numbness that befitted her bleak mood.

Her captors had staunched the bleeding, roughly dressing her wounds. It was no part of their design that she be allowed the release of death. Not until the Emperor's will had been met, and she had been shown to the jeering populace of all the major towns and cities of the Seanchan dominions, leashed like an _torm_ with the _a'dam._ The Emperor. Her son Mordred. Now she ate with tools of soft metal, silver cutlery and pewter plates, to prevent a recurrence.

Tuon had always thought of herself as a resourceful woman. Indefatigable. Proud. She didn't know how to respond to this. Sometimes, a residue of that remembered pride stiffened her neck, and she showed the _sul'dam_ and _damane_ that guarded her the disdain they deserved. In those moments, enervated and goaded into action, Tuon would feverishly plot her escape. To seduce a guard. To work on the _sul'dam_ and guards through a mixture of offered rewards and the fear of an Empress's wrath….

But then her fevered thoughts would run headlong into the same, stark, annihilating truths that made her _sei'mosiev_ before the whole world _._ She wasn't the Empress anymore. She wasn't of the Blood. She wasn't even _human_. She was _damane._ An animal. It was right that she be caged. It was only proper. The only way she could continue to serve the Empire was to learn to be the best _damane_ she could be. It was those thoughts that had brought her to the brink of suicide.

Ultimately, even the hope of such a purposeful life of service – if not as a person, then as a useful tool – had been denied her. Her Leash Holder and the other _sul'dam_ contemptuously dismissed her potential. She was too weak, they told her. Negligible. Not worth the trouble of training.

Existence without utility, without worth. Breath without life.

There were six _sul'dam_ and five _damane_ in her guard, though. To contain her paltry ability, and to prevent any attempt from loyalists to free her. Tuon did not expect there to be any. The Empress Fortuona might have been respected, even loved whilst she was rightly feared. The _damane_ Tuon was just a mongrel bitch, safely collared.

The thought that stalked Tuon round and round through her sleep and waking reveries was that until now, she had never even thought to question her own validity as a person. She had never considered the possibility that she might be unstable, dangerous, even irrational. She supposed that must be true for all madwomen. One could not know that one was insane. And yet the signs must have been there for her to see, had she wished to….

She thought back to her conversation with the _marath'damane_ Amyrlin, Egwene al'Vere, before the Last Battle. It was then that Tuon had first truly confronted the reality that she herself had the latent ability to channel. Of course, she had rationalised it away at that time, telling herself that it was only when a woman made the conscious choice to channel that she gave the beast within its head.

"Perhaps it is true," she had told the Aes Sedai, "that _sul'dam_ can learn to channel. But this is not the same thing as being a _marath'damane_ – any more than a man who can become a murderer is to be considered one."

And yet, and yet…. The _marath'damane_ Egwene al'Vere seemed perfectly lucid. She had even been idealistic, in her own way. Willing to fight for those she claimed as her own. Light, she had haggled like a Sea Folk Wavemistress.

No. Give the woman her due. She had been _statesmanlike_. She had, in fact, proved herself to be Tuon's equal – which was why Tuon had left the debate vexed, her expectations challenged.

Then there was the manner of the woman's death. Tuon, who had disliked Egwene al'Vere intensely, had found a pang of unexpected grief at hearing of her adversary's passing, and had been moved by the grandeur with which she met her demise. It was, Tuon felt, an end worthy of a queen. An Empress, even.

To date, she had sought to see it as the fall of a noble savage, a barbarian chieftain stirred by some better impulse. Now she could not. Would not. Egwene had walked in the Light. In what measure could a woman capable of a deed that resonated so deeply be subhuman?

The realisation struck Tuon like a bolt of lightning, cutting through the cobwebs of self-loathing and despair. Everything she had been taught about _marath'damane_ was a falsehood. A lie fostered by fear, inculcated by one of the Forsaken posing as Artur Hawkwing's most trusted counsellor, who had harped on the great King's natural antipathy towards Tar Valon.

Even their very _name_ was a lie. Women who could learn to channel were just like everyone else. Good or bad according to their actions. The contract of the law was supposed to uphold the righteous and punish the wicked according to their misdeeds.

The leashes weren't needed. They never had been.

As for dealing with the power dynamic created by free women who could channel…. that was a headache, true enough. Yet the Westlanders had found an accommodation with women who could channel. The White Tower, the Kin. And the Aiel and Sea Folk – cultures older than Seanchan – had managed to live harmoniously with women who could channel, and their societies had thrived for three thousand years. Yes, she knew about Windfinders!

So there was precedent. Finding an appropriate solution for the Seanchan people would not be easy, but it would be lazy and morally indefensible not to try….

Tuon was getting ahead of herself, buoyed by an upwelling of hope. Anxiously, she re-examined her conclusions regarding the implication and example of the life of Egwene al'Vere, hoping it wasn't a desperate attempt by her to rationalise her own miserable reality away, to attempt to justify the indefensible.

Tuon couldn't hope to justify the right of a _marath'damane_ to an untrammelled life as a free human being based upon her own life viewed through her own eyes. But she _could_ make a decision based on the life of a _marath'damane_ whose actions were widely regarded throughout the civilised world as exemplary. With dawning hope, Tuon realised the simple truth. And the truth would set her free. She wept, tears of relief and clarity. Tears of joy. They might take from her freedom, her life, even a son's love. But at the end, they could not take her humanity.

She was still smiling when they took her out into the square to be stilled.

* * *

 _She was a rare thing,_

 _Fine as a bee's wing –_

 _So fine a breath of wind might blow her away._

 _She was a lost child, she was running wild_

 _She says 'As long as there's no price on love, I'll stay,_

 _And you wouldn't want me any other way.'_

Mat had continued to talk. It was hard for Rand to think straight, as he tried to marshal his thoughts. To focus on what was important. Right now, all he wanted to do was clutch the memory of Min to him, to dwell in the fragments of recollection. The weight of her as she sat on his lap, bold as the cat who got the cream, the press of her hot cheek against his. The puckish way she bit her lower lip, as if daring him to kiss her.

Mat had told him of his son's perfidy, of Tuon's punishment and sentence of death. Rand wanted to empathise, as he heard the raw pain in his friend's voice, but felt disconnected. Severed from his emotions, listening to an account of the lives of strangers.

A selfish part of Rand wanted Mat to cease, give over talking, leave him to his own emptiness. Min was gone, forever. The Pattern had disdained her, trampled her free spirit. _Even a Tinker's caravan was too much settling down._ That was what the song said. Min's song, their song. The song had ended. Min had woken from the dream. And he was left in interminable, feverish night.

Mat had been blinded with the Power. His son's twisted notion of justice. Anger flared in Rand's heart, ashes of an expiring fire being raked over. Rand blew on the embers. That mattered too. It all mattered, or none of it did.

Mat finally fell silent. Maybe Rand could help, somehow? With the Power, Rand had mastered only the barest rudiments of Healing. He neither had the Talent or the application to learn the sophisticated Healing weaves. But now, in the place of _saidin,_ he had a unique Talent. "Mat, I don't want to get your hopes up. But maybe there's something I can do about your eye. If you'll let me try."

Mat shrugged. "Have at it, if you think it'll do any good. Being blind has little to recommend it." He stiffened as Rand put his fingertips over what had been Mat's good eye, which now stared blind and unfocused. Unresponsive, even to light. A _damane_ had burned out his optic nerves with thread-fine flows of Fire.

Rand shut his own eyes, trying to _feel_. To restore what was. What the Creator had intended. Began to hum the Song of Growing, softly, then growing in confidence. Mat jerked backwards involuntarily with a muttered oath, and Rand withdrew his hand with alacrity, fearing the worst. This _ta'veren_ gift was an unknown quantity, a wild talent. For all he knew, he was hurting Mat instead of helping.

"By the Dark One's hairy _arse_!" Mat breathed in awe, blinking. "You did it, Rand. And I have to say, it beats the _hell_ out of Aes Sedai Healing. Shame about the other eye, though…."

Rand shrugged. "I couldn't feel the possibility for another one. Sorry, Mat, I guess the bargain you made was permanent."

"Yea, figures. Those slimy goat turds in the _ter'angreal_ play for keeps. On the down-side, I get to see this wretched cell, and your brand-new body. That's going to take some getting used to. No offence, but I preferred the original ginger look…. Light, Rand, it looks like they really worked you over some."

"Well, Mat, the clue's in the name. Seekers After Truth. I think they could teach a Whitecloak Questioner a thing or two."

Mat winced in sympathy. "Never had the pleasure, thankfully. Hey, Rand, can't you – I don't know – Heal yourself, or whatever. Then Travel us out of this nether hell, by any chance? I've got a spouse to rescue. Not to mention there are a few arses in dire need of a good kicking!"

Rand groaned in frustration. What an _asinine_ question. "Mat, that's _not_ how Healing works. Look, you surely have to know that by now! I daresay you've been around nearly as many Aes Sedai and _damane_ as I have! You can't Heal yourself.

And Mat, I have no idea what it is I'm doing exactly, but it's not using the Power. I can't channel a light, anymore. What I'm doing has a lot more to do with the stuff that happens around you, the _ta'veren_ twisting. As for Travelling out of here, again….." Rand's voice tailed off as a sudden epiphany surprised him. Mat might have stumbled onto something!

"Wait!" Rand expostulated. "No, Mat you _beautiful_ bastard, that's a _brilliant_ question, not a really stupid one! Your luck affects _you_ , as well as other people. I'm so used to knowing the limitations on what is possible with the Power that I never considered trying my Talent on myself."

* * *

As it turned out, using his Talent to Heal himself was a good deal more straightforward than Healing Mat had been. Rand reset the broken bones he'd suffered, smoothed out the bruises and contusions and Healed the puffy, agonising soles of his tenderised feet. Lastly, he quenched the fever he was running. Health and vitality suffused him. The new vigour was almost enough to make him momentarily forget losing Min. _Almost._

Ruthlessly, Rand quashed the grief, set aside the mindtrap of bittersweet memories. There would be time for mourning later. Right now, he had a friend who needed him.

"Right, Mat, what was the next item on your agenda? Travelling the pair of us out of here? About that….."


	27. Chapter 27: Before The Axe Falls

**Chapter 27: Before the Axe Falls**

Harid Kar placed his fists in the small of his back, wincing as he tried to stretch the stiffness from his bearlike, ponderous frame. He was a big man, running to fat, with a thick black beard which was oiled.

The Headsman was a native of Seandar, where he practiced his trade. Now he was out in the back of beyond, in Shon Klear, the capital of a rustic province principally known for the quality of its horsemen. A place so backwards that they did not even have a designated executioner! So he'd been sent here to perform his duty, Travelling by these new-fangled Gateways opened by the weirding-women.

He still itched at the memory. It was best for a man to have as little to do with the One Power as possible, even though the witches that used it were supposed to be safely leashed and controlled. Aye, but who controlled the _damane_? The _sul'dam._ More witches, in other words, however you spun it. You couldn't tell him that what they did was any more natural. It made his flesh crawl.

It had been a long day. The Emperor himself – may he reign ten thousand years – had demanded a spectacle, and that meant a proper execution stage and scaffold needed to be erected. Harid Kar had hired local labourers to do the carpentry, while he'd sat at his ease under the eaves of a public-house, a pewter mug of strong barley beer in his fist, watching them sweat under the broiling sun.

All in all, it wasn't the worst way to spend a day – apart from that Travelling business anyway – occasionally bawling directions and abuse at the more laggardly or incompetent workers. Yet there was something that was itching at his mind, like a burr under his shirt. Some indefinable thing that plain wasn't right. But Hob take him if he knew what it was.

He was here for the kind of job that – for a man in his line of work – defined his career. That alone was reason enough to travel to Shon Klear, let alone the kind of money he'd been offered which set a man up proper for retirement. He was canny enough to know that the implied retirement was required of him afterward.

The battered leather case that lay beside him contained the tools of his trade. The long headsman's axe, with its wicked single crescent blade, the silken cord required for the bloodless garrotting of High Lords or High Ladies of the Blood. A leather satchel containing pliers, tweezers and knives for the occasion when further torture of his victim was mandated by law. Flint and steel too for those occasions where fire was required. A grisly bit of business, that, and nothing that he took pleasure in. It was just a part of the task at hand.

Tomorrow, it would be the axe that he would use. Not the cord, even though the woman he was supposed to kill was once numbered among the High Blood. There was only one way to have the privilege of belonging to the High Blood revoked – if the offender was found to be _marath'damane,_ or even worse, one of those madmen _Tsorov'ande Doon._ Those few occasions when such an individual was discovered, the person was usually privily put to death in secret and the whole affair covered up, as it reflected upon the Blood as a whole.

But in this instance, the woman was the former Empress Fortuona, and the legitimacy of the young Emperor Mordred's claim depended on her unfitness to rule. So in this case, justice would be seen to be done. Harid Kar hawked and spat. A good thing, too. Tomorrow morning, she would be stilled and then executed, the Light willing.

Harid Kar would be glad when it was over. He didn't speak of it often, but the faces of the people he'd executed kept him awake of nights. Especially the women. He was drinking too much, and his wife was nervous around of him of late, of his sudden wildfire anger. Not that he'd ever raised a hand to her, of course. Now he had the chance to finally hang up that damned axe. Open an inn, maybe.

Things would get better between him and Cari, surely, Harid told himself, angrily pushing aside the insidious thought, _maybe the damage's done, Harid. Maybe hanging up the axe won't stop the faces plaguing your sleep. Won't stop the drinking, either._ Well, after tomorrow, he'd get to see whether a man could be free of his demons, or whether he'd just have yet another woman's face to haunt him. Even if she was _marath'damane._ He had an idea that wouldn't matter, either.

So the day had crept through as the gibbet post shadow traced the square like a sundial and the sun ripened and finally fell away crimson into the West, and he'd fidgeted, chewed tabac and drunk steadily as the shadows lengthened and dusk closed in.

It was gloaming now, and the men worked by the fitful light of a tilly-lamp hung from the yard-arm of the gibbet, laying rough-cut timber planks onto the stage floor and tacking the boards down with nails.

It was then it struck him as he saw the tall man pass by, a stack of deal boards in his arms. Man hadn't spoken a word all day, except yea or nay, and he had a strange accent. Harid hadn't been able to place it, and he was good with dialects.

The dark-haired labourer was dressed roughly, and he was a hard worker, unstinting and consequently hadn't been on the receiving end of the sharp side of Harid Kar's tongue. The fellow seemed to know a hawk from a hacksaw. But it was the damnedest thing. Harid had seen his hands, and he didn't have a workman's calluses.

Harid shivered. Oh, but he had those of a swordsman! Perhaps he was one of those Seekers, sent here to make sure the deal went down the way it was supposed to. The thought that he'd broken bread with one of those creepy bastards made his nuts clench. But why bother, when the woman was being guarded by a legion of Deathwatch, and a half-dozen witches? Didn't make sense.

Harid needed to piss. He stood awkwardly, registering that he'd drunk a lot more than he intended. That fact filled him with a dull, directionless anger, as he shambled into the alley between the pub and a neighbouring house.

Unzipping his trews, he let fly with a groan of relief. A sixth sense made him register, too late, the presence behind him. He half-turned round. It was the dark-haired man behind him, a long billet of ash wood in his hand.

Wordlessly, the man brought the wooden stave down on his head.

* * *

It turned out that Rand's _ta'veren_ twisting of reality could transport both him at Mat into _Tel'aran'rhiod_ and back out of it, though it was an incredibly uncomfortable experience for both men. For Rand, it felt as if his sense of self, of individuality was degrading every time they attempted it.

Finding out where Tuon was turned out to be far easier. The guards had readily divulged her whereabouts to Mat for the asking, seeing no harm in it. The details of the impending execution were common knowledge amongst the Seachan soldiery, having been announced by public proclamation.

One of them had even tried to soften the blow of the news by offering Mat a flagon of wine. "I'm sorry, Raven Prince" the man had said, "I served under you in the Reclamation War, and you always did right staunchly by us. 'Tisn't proper to see you languishing in the jail."

Rand was adamant that he wasn't doing anything about Tuon until he had Elayne's _cour'souvra_ in his possession. Fortunately, an intervening session with the Seekers had seen one of them produce the mindtrap during the interrogation. It hung around the man's neck. So now he knew where the _ter'angreal_ was. Once more, he suffered their ministrations, holding on to the knowledge that it would be the last time.

After the interrogation, as soon as he had Healed himself once more, he made a visit to the repository in the Stone of Tear where he'd stashed the sword of Laman of Cairhien. The Power-wrought sword, its sleek blade marked with herons, its ivory hilt inset with precious stones, was the kind of weapon that attracted unwanted attention on his travels. Now, he had need of it once again. The arrogant personal weapon of a king and a killer.

His next visit to the Seekers had ended rather differently. Punctuated by their screams. The walls painted with their blood. The Seekers After Truth were adequate fighters, but not exceptional. Armed only with their long knives, they were no match for a Blademaster bearing Power-wrought steel. Rand al'Thor's torturers had fought with the desperate terror of cornered rats, as he cut them down.

Breathing heavily, not with fatigue but with the rawness of emotion, Rand wrenched the _cour'souvra_ from around the Seeker's neck, and fastened it securely about his own, feeling an immense relief as he did so, strong enough to overcome the rage he'd experienced.

Mat had then demanded that Rand take him straight to Shon Klear. Rand told him no. "I can barely carry you and I when I Travel. If I tried to shift you, me and Tuon, I'd lose all sense of self. Or I'd leave us all stranded outside the Pattern."

Mat shivered, remembering seeing the _gholam_ falling forever into endless night, into the dead space outside _ta'maral'ailen_.

"I'll do it" Rand assured him, clasping his shoulder. "I can get in and out with Tuon, no bother. All I need is the time to Learn the place I grab her from in the real world. And with what I have in mind, I'll have plenty of time to do that."

"Fine" Mat grudgingly allowed, biting his nails. "Where will you take her after? Light, Rand, if you're too late, Tuon'll be _stilled._ Maybe she has been already…"

"Don't worry" Rand reassured him. "Believe it or not, Nynaeve can Heal even that. In that eventuality, I'll take her to Malkier. Otherwise, I'll drop her into the Winespring Inn back home. Either way, then I'll come back here and grab you and take you to her. Can't say fairer than that."

" _Nynaeve_ can heal Stilling?!" Mat muttered incredulously. "Of course she bloody can. Miss bloody capable el'Nyaneve ti'al'Meara flaming Mandragoran sodding Queen of Malkier."

"Well, in this instance that's surely a _good_ thing, Mat" Rand said gently. "Light, you sound like Uno!"

"And won't she just let us know that?!" Mat said, but his softened tone indicated he was somewhat mollified. "Go, Rand" he urged. "Watch yourself among those Seanchan bastards, mind. You can't trust them as far as you can throw them. I've lived amongst them, and I know what I'm talking about. Don't get yourself killed. And Rand…" Mat's voice cracked and he swallowed. "Bring her back to me. Please. Right now, I feel like that lass is all I have."

* * *

Tuon felt numb. Her hands were bound in front of her. Ridiculous. It wasn't as if she was going anywhere. The scaffold and stage were cordoned off, surrounded by a two-deep formation of heavily-armed soldiers. Six _damane_ and _sul'dam_ oversaw proceedings, placed where they had vantage over the whole square. It would take a small army to free her.

The crowd's mood was ugly, their anger directed at her. That cut deep. She understood that they would feel betrayed that the Empress they looked upon as their protector had turned out to be _marath'damane,_ but it hurt like a keen knife just the same. She kept her back straight, her carriage as regal as her bonds allowed. _If you mount the gallows, give a curtsey to the crowd, a coin to the hangman, and leave with a jest upon your lips._

Tuon wasn't good at jokes, but she had some things she was determined to say, if they did not silence her. It was pointless as a convicted felon to rail against the injustice done to the _marath'd…_ to those who could learn to channel, but she could urge the people to support Mordred. Not because he was her son, but because for all its strength, she could feel Seanchan was a mighty warship whose hull had been breached. She would sink unless her crew pulled together.

Like it or not, he was the Emperor they had. Semirhage and the Succession Wars had accounted for most of the High Blood. If Mordred fell, it would be bloody. There was no clear successor. Generals and warlords, opportunists tearing her nation apart. Everything she and Mat had sacrificed would have been for nothing.

Mat. Her Knotai. Truly, he must be the most put-upon husband in the world. Even in private, for all the tenderness she felt, Tuon had to force herself to be the Empress with him. There were too many attentive ears, too many spying eyes looking for any sign of weakness.

Even now, on the gallows, the tears that welled – tears at the thought of losing him – must remain unshed. But she found solace and strength in her memories of him, especially that wild time before her coronation, when he had abducted her, and they had scarpered around the countryside, enmeshed in each other, that cat's cradle called love. It had been carefree, and irresponsible, indecorous. It had been _wonderful_.

After, he had been a rock, not a rival, her strong right arm and shield. He had shown her the meaning of loyalty. Not the blind obedience of a soldier to his queen, but the fidelity of a good man to his family. To his woman. He had given everything for her. Even his son. Had it been worth it? Worth the terrible price they had both paid?

Loving her had destroyed him. She saw that now. If ever she saw him again, she would tell him to leave her. To flee far away. But she knew he wouldn't go…. A fool's fancy. She would never see him again in this life.

They had done ..something.. to her. Those _damane_ and the cruel _sul'dam_. A violation she didn't understand. Something profound that stilled the sun beyond the horizon and left her heart in perpetual darkness. Something that set her adrift to founder like a ship being carried in to wreck amongst the rocks. Something that even her Mat could not put right. But soon none of that would matter anymore.

The hangman was tall, a frightening figure in the cowl that concealed his face. The purpose, Tuon knew, was to protect the executioner and his family from the reprisals of victims and their families, but to her he seemed a harbinger of the afterworld.

Swallowing, she turned towards the executioner. "Sir Headsman" said she, extending her hands, proffering the silver mark that was the only coin she had. "I bear you no ill will. You but do your duty as a loyal servant of the Empire. Take this coin with my blessing, and I ask only that you strike clean and give me a good death."

The headsman stepped towards her, and to her consternation, he inclined his head, and took her small hands in both of his. In a low voice, he spoke gently. "Empress Fortuona, I am a friend of your husband. I'm here to rescue you."

Tuon started, bristling at the unwanted physical contact. In the same low tones, she replied to him coolly. "I thank you for your loyalty to my husband, but as he would say himself were he here, just take the _bloody_ coin and give me my hand back – do not make so free! There is no way you can get me out of here. No, not if you came with an army at your back!"

"Oh, for once in your life, Tuon, just be quiet and do as someone asks! I'm the _bloody_ Dragon Reborn. I can _do_ this. Just keep hold of my hand, and don't let go no matter what." Rand hissed.

And with a wrench, the world disappeared.

* * *

Demandred arrived at the Towers of Midnight, where Mordred had sent him that nightfall, fulfilling his end of the bargain they had struck. Instead of having Lews Therin turned over into his custody, his incredulous gaze found only the deserted cells that had formerly housed the Dragon Reborn and Maitrim Cauthon.

The guards and jailers fled before his face, seeing his wrath, and wanting no part of an enraged _Tsorov'ande Doon_. The violence of his rage at being cheated of his prey shook the firmament of the Towers of Midnight as the tormented cries of Deain Sedai had done an eon ago. The wrath of Demandred would shake the very world upon its footings.

With an oath, he ripped a Gateway into existence, a bleeding rent in the fabric of reality, which opened onto the Mol Hara in Ebou Dar.


	28. Chapter 28: Tsorov'ande Doon

**Chapter 28: Tsorov'ande Doon**

Demandred was one with the Power. One with the pulsing magma heart of Sakarnen that he carried in his left hand like an aegis. One with the long black sword at his left hip. Both incited to violence, demanded to be used. Inside, he was wintry and implacable, the _ko'di_ tempering his fell spirit into a sword of ice. Outside the Void, his rage and fury boiled untrammelled. He had been balked, once again, of Lews Therin. And this lying blackbird Mordred Paendrag would bear the brunt of his wrath.

He fell upon the Tarasin Palace with the force of a cyclone, the Oneness inside him the darkling eye of the storm, its malicious heart. He did not deign to observe such niceties as corridors, the magnitude of _saidin_ he was wielding joyously wrecking everything in his path, smashing stone and splintering wood. Demandred exulted in his naked strength, his dominion.

 _Damane_ sought to fight back, throwing half a hundred individual shields trying to sever his connection to the Source, the raging torrent pouring into him through Sakarnen. It was risible. An exercise in futility. Without Sakarnen, it would require a circle of thirteen to cut his connection to the Power. With it, he could likely withstand a _full circle_ of seventy-two men and women. These Seanchan couldn't link, except the trivial circle between _damane_ and _sul'dam._

Demandred allowed himself a ghastly smile. All these bite-me's had done was reveal their hiding place. He didn't even bother to parry them with shields of his own, letting their paltry shields strike futilely at the vast river of _saidin_ he was directing, before reaching out to crush his attackers in fists of Spirit.

Most of the denizens of the Palace fled before him, forsaking duty, even the Deathwatch Guards and Ogier Gardeners. Demandred did not blame them. He was a foe beyond their ken, the avatar of a dark God. They could not fight him. Only flee or die. He still killed them indiscriminately, sending gouts of Fire billowing through the corridors, harrowing the ground with flows of Earth and Fire. Their allegiance had brought their doom upon themselves.

A mace of Air cast down the doors to the Throne Room, and Demandred strode through the wrack imperiously. A row of _da'covale_ women in diaphanous silks that stood behind the Throne were burned away with a finger of Balefire, the beam of light passing through them momentarily turning them into negative images before they dissipated into motes of light. Demandred had no regard for their beauty, these ephemeral people with their short, meaningless lives.

A wintry blast of Water and Air froze Guardsmen solid before they could move in defence of their liege lord, slivers of Spirit and Fire severing the channellers from the Source, the hybrid Shields inflicting searing pain that left the _sul'dam_ and _damane_ incapacitated, writhing in torment. Demandred frowned at their screams and cries, irritated, and silenced them forever, using a knife of Spirit, Fire and Water to stop their hearts.

The Seanchan Emperor watched the deaths of his people with commendable calm, Demandred thought. Without so much as flinching. He and the Forsaken were the only two yet living in the Throne Room.

Demandred shrugged his shoulders, displacing a fall of plaster dust, frowning in irritation when he saw the immaculate monochromatic black of his garb had been impregnated by the grime. A simple weave of Air dusted him down, leaving his clothing and hair pristine once again.

He fixed Mordred with a penetrating gaze. "We had an agreement, little king" the Forsaken addressed him, his voice threatening like the rumbling subsidence of the earth to a man trapped deep underground in a dark mineshaft. "You promised to deliver me the Dragon Reborn. He has escaped you. Do you recall what I told you would befall if you failed to live up to your end of the bargain?"

Mordred met Demandred's hooded eyes with an effort of will. For the first time, he was truly aware of how ancient this creature was. How ancient and full of malice. His mouth was dry.

When Demandred saw that the boy king could or would not give tongue, he continued.

"I was prepared to give you _Shara_ in exchange for Lews Therin." Demandred mused. "Now, I think I will rule here in your stead. I will be _Nae'blis_ in my own world, and Emperor of Seanchan and Shara here in this one.

And I _will_ have the Dragon, boy. Your screams will draw your father here. His will bring his friend, Rand al'Thor. And if the Dragon is still too afraid to face me, I shall harrow this world until I discover my enemy, and I will not leave one stone atop another until I find and crush him!"

With a disarming absence of haste, Mordred reached into the folds of his robes, slowly withdrawing a long, thin metal blade, half a foot in length. _Fool,_ thought Demandred. _You will be dead a hundred times over before you get a chance to use that knife on me._ Even without the Power, the long sword that girt his hip would cut the impetuous boy into gullbait ere he had a chance to use the dirk upon him.

But the Emperor did not arise from his throne, his small, clever hands deftly turning over the object. Not a knife, Demandred saw, but a spike of some metal that glittered dull silver, with a flattened top like a tent-peg.

Realisation struck Demandred at the same instant that Sakarnen fell inert in his hands, becoming a cold and lifeless piece of metal. _Saidin_ vanished. Demandred could not even sense its existence in the Void. No, not a knife. A Dreamspike.

Worse. This _ter'angreal_ prevented him even accessing the One Power. He knew that such things existed. The city of Far Madding had been protected by one such, a _ter'angreal_ known as the Guardian. With preparation, it was possible to circumvent the Guardian by bringing a Well, a reservoir of _saidin,_ inside the city. But even if he'd had the foresight to have brought one, Sakarnen would drain it in a heartbeat, unless it was the Eye of the World itself.

Inside the radius of effect, Demandred was no more than any other man. The Chosen felt a frisson of some choice emotion enervate his body. Deep in the Void, he identified it. Fear. He had walked into a trap. And if the boy king had equipped his _damane_ with Wells _,_ he would presently be dead. Now he only had his wits. And his sword.

 _Kill the boy. Deactivate the Dreamspike. Get out of here._ Demandred dropped Sakarnen as if it was rubbish, the priceless _sa'angreal_ hitting the ground with a weighty yet somehow unimportant thud and rolling away. Without _saidin,_ it was just a gold sceptre. An empty token of authority.

In the same instant, the Forsaken fell into an instinctive fighting stance, hand flashing to his left hip. The ebony hilt of the long blade was in his hand, as Demandred freed the black steel in an easy single-handed draw with a mordant laugh. The Moon Rises Over The Lakes. He started forward towards his quarry.

The floor erupted beneath Demandred's feet as a gigantic arm thrust upwards, a massive hand grasping the Forsaken's ankles. The Ogier toppled Demandred as it arose from the concealed place in the floor where it had been patiently entombed in ambush, a grimy figure arising from the rubble, shedding its burden of earth and chips of rock.

With a snarl, even while falling, Demandred twisted round to face his opponent, sword sweeping down. The Chosen struck with savagery and skill, the long iron finding the gap between the _alantin's_ gauntlet and vambrace with Leopard's Caress, hewing the beast's hand from him. Ducking under a swipe of the Ogier's other paw, he surged to his feet, stepping perilously inside the giant's embrace to lance the sword's point up into the Ogier's neck. Kissing the Adder.

With a vicious twist of his wrist, he deliberately inflicted further damage while levering the sword free using The Moon Rises Over Water, widening the deep gash in the Ogier's throat, half-beheading him within his carapace of armour. Demandred had occasion to know just how much punishment an Ogier could take. It would be a mistake to assume a wound that would incapacitate or kill a human would be sufficient to stop one of the _alantin_.

Angered at the distraction, Demandred flexed his wrist, droplets of wine-dark Ogier blood falling from the great sword he had unlimbered. _Anir Shiatir,_ the sword was named. Star Iron. It was a hand-and-a-half sword, slightly curved, edged only on one side, finessing to a cruel point, a blade of meteorite iron, Power-forged so that it would never break or lose its edge.

The long steel and unadorned black wood of the hilt were simply if exquisitely fashioned, without even the Blademaster's heron mark. The absence of the herons was a constant reminder to Demandred that for all the accolades of man, in battle anything could happen. The greatest warrior in the world was still but a mortal man.

Demandred had lived a long time. Long enough to witness all the vagaries of chance. To see great warriors cut down from behind by frightened farmboys wielding billhooks and mattocks. Long enough to know and recognise his own flaws. His pride, rage and hubris.

The reason why he had lived so long despite the mandate of his nature was his ruthlessness. His tenacity. Once he had committed to a course of action, he would stick unflinchingly to his task, without second-guessing himself. Strike first, strike hardest, and wait for the other fellow to flinch first. That was the line that separated recklessness from audacity. The line Demandred walked. What made him great.

With a crash, and a pattering of falling plaster, two hulking forms punched and shouldered their way through the wall behind where the Emperor awaited him. Demandred swore softly. Two more Ogier. They moved forward to flank their master, and then to interpose their mighty frames as bulwark between him and the object of his wrath. Unlike the beast that had lain hidden in the ground, these were bearing weapons, great double-headed axes in each hand.

Humans often made the mistake of seeing the giant Ogier as ponderous and slow, both in thought and deed. Demandred had occasion to know better. With lifespans spanning centuries, the _alantin_ weren't easily rushed or goaded into impetuous action. Difficult to manipulate. They were considered and temperate, crafty and slow to anger.

There was a saying that had been old when he was young. _Anger the Ogier, and bring the mountains down upon your head_. A feat difficult to accomplish, but fatal once achieved. They made implacable foes. Once you had made an Ogier your enemy, they would follow you to the ends of the earth, and pursue your destruction with single-minded dedication.

Despite their bulk, fighting Ogier were fast and graceful, light on their feet as well as terribly powerful. And with centuries to perfect their craft, they were accomplished warriors. They barely felt the weight of the heavy protective armour they were encased in, and even unarmoured, they would shrug off wounds that would kill a human.

You had to relentlessly attack, braving the awesome reach of their axe blades to strike a mortal blow, and you couldn't defend as you would against a human. The force of their blows would sweep you away like an Autumn leaf if you were fool enough to try and stand your ground and parry their attacks. Demandred would rather face two Myrddraal than a single Ogier of the calibre and experience of these Ogier Gardeners. Now he faced a pair, alone.

But he was no ordinary mortal. He was Demandred. His derision was directed at the Emperor Mordred. "You don't seem to have grasped who you are dealing with, boy. I am _Bao the Wyld._ I have slain a full-grown _jumara_!You think a mere two Ogier can stop me?"

The Emperor was silent. Attentive. The only sound was the heavy footfalls of the Ogier pair as they marched forward together in lockstep, weapons held low and ready. Demandred fell into the twisting, sidling gait of Leopard in High Grass, feinting right, then breaking left in a sudden burst of acceleration. His intent was to isolate one of the Ogier.

The nearest Ogier stabbed out the long axe in a lancing blow to corral him and prevent him working round to his unprotected flank, checking him. _Clever bastard._ Simultaneously, the _alantin_ scythed his left-hand axe at waist height in a blow intended to cleave him in half.

Demandred leapt high, timing the balletic jump with exquisite perfection, pushing off the swung axe with the sole of his left foot as he fell into Thistledown Floats on the Whirlwind, sword sweeping out to hew the Ogier's head from his thick neck. The blow landed precisely where Demandred intended, on the ringmail above the gorget and below the greathelm.

The hard-swung swordblade bounced from the Ogier's neck, though the Gardener grunted and staggered under the impact of the blow. _What the…?_

Demandred recovered fastest, landing smoothly, dancing adroitly aside as the second Ogier bulled forward. Cat on Hot Sand. Cat Dances on the Wall slapped away the second beast's axe, the long iron reversing in a raking slash that found the gap in the armour behind the giant's knee, hamstringing him.

A flicker of movement was the only warning that he got, the shadow of the headsman's axe and he threw himself aside in a tumbler's roll as the falling axe bit into the floor where he'd stood, spraying chips of marble. Rising lightly, Demandred stalked forward relentlessly, wanting to dictate the tempo of the fight.

Cat Crossing the Courtyard became Courtier Taps His Fan, the cut aimed squarely at the wooden haft of an Ogier's axe, his intent to depilate the weapon. Instead, his sword bounced free, and he was forced a second time to desperately twist aside from a blow that would have split him from collarbone to pelvis.

The Cyclone Rages spun him in between his two foes in a desperate bit of improvisation – brilliant because it was the last thing either would expect. Demandred used the half-second of advantage he had bought in a frenzied assault that was intended to take the injured Ogier out of the fight for good, and he threw his body weight into a kick against the Ogier's damaged knee, pushing off into Lightning of the Three Prongs, the blows he dealt falling like hail.

The first stroke finished the job of severing the Gardener's leg, the second was parried by the Ogier's big gauntlet, the third landing perfectly on the Ogier's neck once more. Yet again the sable blade refused to bite. Instead, the infuriated Ogier swept him away with an armoured fist, the backhand blow hurling Demandred clear across the room.

Demandred landed hard, fetching up against the wall. He spat blood, doggedly clawing his way to his feet. He dug the point of the Star Iron into the floor, using it as a crutch to haul himself upright. With a grimace of exertion, Demandred took guard, both hands on the hilt of his sword, in Tower of Morning.

Fighting an Ogier was like baiting a bear. Hound-like persistence and superior quickness and stamina was the way to bring them down. But three times, killing blows had been turned aside by chain mail. His eyes widened as he realised what he was up against. "You _didn't_.." he muttered, with a new appreciation for the machinations of the Seanchan Emperor.

For the first time, Mordred replied, with a certain measure of satisfaction. "I most certainly did. _Cuendillar_ armour and spear shafts. Power-wrought steel blades. Now, I will get to see how a _Da'concion_ dies."

Demandred could barely spare the breath to reply. The prickling pain in his right side indicated he had at least one broken rib. Possibly several. He saw that the injured Ogier had finally succumbed to his wounds, lying on his back like a felled redwood. He roused himself, shaking himself like a great mastiff. _Two down. One to go._

He gestured to the remaining Ogier. "Come on then, you big bastard!" he snarled defiantly. "I'm going to chop you up for kindling too! And once I've slaughtered your Emperor, I'm going to take the time to burn down one or two of your precious forests with that" he baited his adversary, indicating the mighty _sa'angreal_ Sakarnen with a jerk of his head.

With the implacability of a landslide, the Gardener surged forward ferociously, axes swinging eagerly. Demandred shifted his left hand down to grip the blade a hand's span below the hilt, bracing the blade's unsharpened side. It would give him much-needed leverage in bracing himself against an opponent of such gargantuan strength. He did not have to feign the exhaustion of a fighter brought to bay.

Tower of Morning became the Bastard Cross as Demandred subtly shifted his weight onto his front foot, turning three-quarters on to his looming foe, the hilt of his sword pointing towards his opponent, sword resting loosely across his chest.

The Ogier stepped left, bringing the axe down in a sweeping blow designed to embed the axehead into Demandred's spine. Demandred, in perfect balance used his left leg as a pivot, stepping smoothly back with his right leg and sweeping the sword up as a bar to the descending axe.

Power-marked steel ground together in a fountain of sparks as the Forsaken turned away the heavy blow, and subtle as a snake, slipping within the reach of the long axe, Threading the Needle found the exposed gap under the Ogier's arm. The Ogier's lifeblood began to pour from the rent, dark and viscous.

With a trumpeting bellow, the Ogier dropped the axe, grabbing the frail body of his human opponent, intending to crush him to death against his chest in a bear-hug. With a last, galvanic effort, Demandred found the eyehole of the Ogier's helm with the tip of his foreshortened sword, leveraging his blade to plunge into the hole and pierce the Ogier's eye and the brain beneath.

The Gardener spasmed in his death throes, clutching at Demandred instinctively before releasing him from his grasp like a ragdoll. Demandred landed on the flat of his back, causing further agony to his battered ribs, as the Ogier tottered, before falling his full length, armour ringing out his ruin.

Only the imperative of vengeance gave the Forsaken the strength to find his feet for a second time. "Just me and you now, boy" he promised the young Emperor grimly as he advanced upon him, hefting the black sword. "No more hiding! No more games! After the trouble you've caused me in taming your menagerie of beasts, I'm going to open your belly like a spawning salmon and scoop out the roe for my table! Any more tricks, little king? Any last words?"

Mordred looked up at the Forsaken. "Last words" he enunciated "are for losers."

"Well said, little king." Demandred uttered tonelessly, springing forward like a wounded panther. "Let us make an end." The Star Iron sang as it cut the air vengefully in Red Hawk Takes the Dove, intending to cleave the boy king through the brisket.

Demandred had an instant's warning only in the narrowing of the youngling's eyes, as Mordred's right hand blurred, lacquered fingers wrapping round his own sword hilt.

The Seanchan boy was _sudden,_ as rapid as any Demandred had faced in his long life, freeing his blade and cutting at Demandred in a heartbeat, using the seated version of Low Wind Rising. The audacious blow would have opened the Forsaken's jugular before continuing to parry Demandred's stroke, and the Chosen jerked his head back just in time.

He felt the steel score his flesh – tracing a line across his throat – before his own stroke bound the boy king's blade. For a glacial moment, Demandred thought that he was a dead man.

In that instant, Mordred Paendrag surged upright, using the sole of his left foot to push off the heavy lacquered wood of the throne, falling into Heron Wading in the Rushes, on the ball of his right foot, sword held high.

The form left the young man wide open momentarily, but this young blacklance had the nous to know Demandred had momentarily hesitated, and the technique and scintillating rapidity to take full advantage, leaping high into Heron Spreads His Wings, sword spearing down at Demandred, who countered rapidly with The Wind Blows Over the Wall.

They exchanged a blistering series of blows at close quarters before Demandred eased back a pace, sword held low. He had taken the young man's measure. He was sure and quick – quicker than Demandred – but Demandred had put others just as quick in the ground.

They circled, Demandred's blade weaving an eldritch spell. Mordred leapt in with Wind and Rain. The older man leant aside, Parting the Silk, the long black iron laying open the Seanchan's forearm. Undeterred, Mordred spun on his heel, lashing out with Ribbon In The Air. Demandred stepped in, blades binding together, trying to force the youth to take a backward step.

Instead, Mordred extemporised, reversing on his heel again to hammer a backfist strike into Demandred's face. Demandred only laughed, relishing his opponent's improvisation. He was enjoying himself. The Forsaken extricated himself with a vicious variation on The Grapevine Twines, drawing blood from Mordred's thigh.

With a war cry, the shaven-headed Seanchan surged forward again. _The boy has heart_ , thought Demandred. _He comes from good stock, this one._ But he was two, maybe three years away from maturing into the fighter he could be. _A pity,_ Demandred thought, then hardened his heart: _No. He is dangerous enough to manage to cut me. Focus._

Mordred was visibly tiring, the cuts Demandred had inflicted sapping the youth's strength and vigour. He came at Demandred again, boring in with Rat Gnaws The Grain. Demandred noted approvingly that despite his wounds, the boy was still _thinking._ His head was still in the game even if he was a half-step slow. At this point, usually opponents killed themselves with rashness or anger, their strategy being the first thing to go.

Demandred took his measure, _sizing him up for his casket_ , and sure enough, Mordred followed up with Hummingbird Kisses the Honeyrose. Not a bad idea, but his tired body telegraphed the move, and Demandred countered reflexively with the Viper Flicks Its Tongue, intending to sever the young man's right hand at the wrist.

Some instinct checked him, and at the last instant, he redirected the stroke. The Star Iron struck the Seanchan's sword with numbing force just above the tang, knocking it from Mordred's hand. Quick as a weasel, the Seanchan turned on his heel, clearly intending to flee, and Demandred, disappointed and surprised to find his opponent was a rank coward, surged forward to cleave the black steel into the craven's spine…

And ran straight into a reverse roundhouse kick that hammered into his temple.

Some latent survival reflex kicked in, as Demandred was downed for a third time, heavily concussed but still conscious. Barely. His right hand still had a death-grip on the Star Iron.

Operating on instinct, Mordred went after his own sword, rather than doing what he ought to – kick the sword from the fallen man's hand and go to the ground to finish Demandred there with his superior hand-to-hand skills.

It brought Demandred precious seconds to clear his head, to regain his shaky feet. But he was still standing, with _Anir Shiatir_ in his hands, and that meant that Mordred Paendrag was a dead man walking.

A massive hand clasped his ankle like a bear-trap, and a shocked Demandred looked down incredulously to see the Ogier with a severed leg that he'd thought was dead clinging to life as grimly as he hung to the heels of the Forsaken. With a feral snarl, Demandred plunged the Star Iron down, finding the unarmoured spot between the backplate and the helm, severing the Gardener's spine.

Demandred swung back to where Mordred awaited. He was too late. He felt the young man's sword plunge expertly into his back, transfixing his heart. _Anir Shiatir_ fell from nerveless fingers, and it felt to the Forsaken that he'd fallen into an icy river that enervated his body, his breath expelled from frozen lungs in a gust.

With the last of his strength, he turned his head to meet the eyes of his killer. Demandred whispered one word through numbed lips. "Dishonourable."

Mordred met the eyes of the Butcher Bird and shrugged dismissively. "Dead is dead."

Then his strong young fingers seized the hilt of the sword he'd driven through Demandred's body and wrenched it free. And the Forsaken's soul issued from his body along with his heart's blood.


	29. Chapter 29: She Who Gives Shade

**Chapter 29: She Who Gives Shade**

With a _ki'ai,_ the war-shout focusing the warrior's efforts, the young Malkieri committed himself to the attack.

Threading the Needle, a fluid lunge, was turned away with minimal effort by his opponent, The Swallow Takes Flight brushing his blade deftly aside, a movement of grace and precision where the older man's sword-tip moved barely a hand's span before flowing into his own counter. Al'Akir spun awkwardly away from Courtier Taps His Fan, barely escaping a solid blow to his ribcage, lashing out with River of Light.

A stroke that never landed. The old man's wooden _shinai_ clouted him on the elbow. With a grunt of pain, al'Akir ignored the pain and leapt forward. The Lion Springs. Lan sprang back, raising a palm to indicate the bout was over.

"Don't bother, boy. I've just cut your arm off" he told his son gruffly. "If you want to continue the bout, left hand only. Ten heartbeats before you'd bleed out, anyway." He frowned at al'Akir. "I know you're better than this. Son, what's _with_ you today? No focus."

Al'Akir flushed to the roots of his hair. Raised his sword. "Again!"

Lan levelled his blade, settling into his stance. "Whenever you're ready."

Al'Akir bellowed his challenge as he came. The Boar Rushes Downhill earned him a stinging blow to his ribs from Lan. The youth leapt into Dandelion in the Wind.

 _Awful. Telegraphed,_ Lan thought, frustrated, as he ghosted aside, sweeping al'Akir's legs out from under him with Bundling Straw. His sword was at his son's chest as he fell awkwardly on the hard-packed earth of the training-square. "Dead again."

He stepped back, offering an arm to pull al'Akir to his feet. Angrily, the boy slapped his hand away in a display of petulance, heaving himself to his feet. "Again!" he demanded.

Lan performed Folding the Fan, sheathing the wooden blade in his unscabbarded belt. "No, son. We're done sparring for the day." He squatted on his hunkers, squeezing al'Akir's shoulder, fixing him with a concerned glance. "You're not yourself, today. A crown gets me a shilling that a girl is involved."

Al'Akir coloured and said nothing. That was answer enough.

Lan offered his best sympathetic smile. "Ah. That Aiel girl, Shaiel. Aviendha's daughter. No wonder you're practicing the sword with all the grace of a dancing Trolloc."

"Don't honey the medicine, Dad. Just give it to me straight" al'Akir muttered, sarcastically. "Ay. Shaiel. I know what you're going to say: _Forget it. No romantic entanglements especially with a wild Aiel girl, a future Malkieri King marries for the good of the realm._ I know my duty, Pa. And I'll do it. And I'm pragmatic enough to know it's love's first flush and like as not what I feel won't last. Doesn't change the fact that right now, all I can see when I close my eyes is her face."

Lan sighed and draped a heavy arm around al'Akir's shoulders. "Son, you're a good lad. I never doubted that you'd do us proud. Actually, Shaiel wouldn't be the worst match, politically. Her mother is a Wise One, which is royalty as Aiel see it, and her father… Her father was the Dragon Reborn, who the Aiel see as the _Car'a'carn,_ the Chief of Chiefs. It'd strengthen Malkier's ties to the Taardad Aiel… No, I just dislike seeing you like this. Dejected. Cast down."

"Dad. I'm minded to tell her how I feel" al'Akir said, after a pregnant pause. "How do I go about that? I don't know much about Aiel customs."

Lan looked at his son's earnest, serious face. He was minded just how similar his lad was to him at the same age. "Hmm. Tricky one. Well. Shaiel's a Maiden of the Spear. They take that pretty seriously. It's almost a calling. A Maiden is 'wedded to the spear', you know. Taking a husband means giving up the spear, and walking away from her spear-sisters. Those are bonds as strong as blood, boy. Most won't consider it."

Al'Akir looked at the ground fatalistically, shoulders slumping. "Sounds like I'm out of luck, then."

"Not necessarily. Aiel Maidens sometimes take boyfriends. Of course, her spear-sisters will all know about it, and the hazing the poor man gets is unbelievable. And if a man was ever fool enough to treat a Maiden wrong… Doesn't bear thinking about. He'd be pushing up daisies ere the sun set.

Look, son. I'm not saying don't do it, but think seriously about what you're about. For a wetlander, courting an Aiel girl is probably the most dangerous thing imaginable. A lot of Aiel don't like wetlanders. They'll certainly test you. Make you show them you're a real man."

Lan smiled a craggy smile. "Might toughen you up, boy. I'd say if her spear-sisters like you for her, you have half a chance." He shrugged. "Who knows, son? Aiel women are .. temperamental. Fierce and fey. .. No honest man would ever claim to understand women. Least of all me. Let alone an Aiel Maiden….One thing. If she asks you to play Maiden's Kiss, politely decline!"

"Maiden's Kiss? What's that? And why shouldn't I play at it?" al'Akir asked, curiosity piqued.

Lan stood, stretching easily. "Let's put it this way. You could go there with a beard like Perrin Aybara's and come back as clean-shaven as a Seanchan High Lord. If you play well. Anyway, son, I have to go, attend your mother. We have a visitor."

"Wait, Dad" al'Akir pleaded.

"Sorry, son. Perhaps you can ask our guest about Aiel Maidens, tonight. I believe he took up with an Aiel _Far Dareis Mai_ , upon a time."

* * *

 _Nynaeve looks much the same_ , Mat wondered, _despite the passage of nearly two decades._ It was because of the Slowing, he knew, the effect of using the One Power decreasing the rate of aging. Twenty years was nothing to an Aes Sedai. That still felt unfair to Mat.

The only sign of the passage of time was in her dark eyes, shaded and softened with cares. The years brought their troubles, Mat had cause to know. Seeing her thus reminded him of Moraine.

She was dressed in Cairhienin silks, a cobalt blue so dark that it appeared to shade into black, slashed with sea green. Mat noted the number of horizontal bars of green with interest – at least a dozen, signifying her exalted rank. Nynaeve's hair was pinned up elaborately in a coif, and her forehead wore the _ki'sain_ – a red dot, a Malkieri tradition symbolising a pledge to teach her children to fight the Shadow.

Seeing her for the first time in a dozen years, he was again surprised by how slight she was. Diminutive, even. Until she opened her mouth, that was. It was only her forceful manner, the conviction she knew what was best for you better than you yourself did that made her appear to loom so in his recollection.

The reading-room was a comfortable, intimate space, a wooden screen, elaborately carved with hunting scenes partitioning the room from a balcony overlooking the courtyard, which was slightly ajar to allow a gentle breeze to permeate the room. There was a small, cheerful fire glowing in a fireplace – sea coal not wood – to offset the chill. Wood was more precious than gold in barren Malkier. Nynaeve stood to greet him.

"As I live and breathe, it's really you, Maitrim Cauthon." Was that fondness in her eye? No, surely not. Nynaeve didn't do fondness.

"Nynaeve" Mat replied, awkwardly. "Um. Thanks for having me, I suppose. You are well, I hope? You look well. Very… regal." This was going badly already. "Good to see you." Mat was surprised to find that he meant it. There was a prickling in his eye and he rubbed the offending tear away.

With a swish of silk, Nynaeve glided over to him – she'd got better at that, Mat noticed. Important life skill for queens. Not as proficient as his Tuon mind you! – and to his consternation grabbed him and hugged him fiercely. Surprised, he stiffened, then hugged her back.

She released him and wrinkled her nose at him. "You need a bath. And a shave." She looked him up and down. "You're as skinny as a rake, too. Honestly, who's been feeding you? They haven't been doing a good job of it. Typical man. Just like my Lan. The lot of you would waste away left to your own devices."

"Well, I've just got out of the gaol, Nynaeve. In Seanchan. The Towers of Midnight" Mat expostulated. "Distinct lack of amenities and creature comforts."

"Well, I always said you'd end up in prison, Maitrim Cauthon" she said sternly, folding her arms across her chest in her best Wisdom pose, foot tapping. But there was a twinkle in her eye gainsaying the harsh words.

"Or on the gallows." Mat offered helpfully, an innocent expression on his face. "You said that too."

"You could also use some clean clothes, Mat" she said peremptorily, ignoring him. Turning, she clapped her hands, summoning her maidservant, a stout woman buried in a confection of white linen and lace. "Find my chamberlain please, Asara, and have him select some clothing for Master Cauthon. Good Two Rivers wool."

"And a hat" Mat interrupted. "A good hat. Most important item of a man's wardrobe, Shatayan Asara. Whatever you do, don't forget the hat. I've lost mine and I feel quite naked without it."

"An image we could all have done quite without" Nynaeve responded dryly. "As Master Cauthon says," Nynaeve told the maid. "Tell the chamberlain to purchase a good Tairen hat of felt, with a broad brim. Then take it out into the stableyard and find a nice dusty patch. Then throw it on the ground and trample on it a while, dust it off, then bring it directly to Master Cauthon."

"You can scoff all you want, Nynaeve, but a good hat has been lived in a while. It has _character_." Mat protested. "The scuffs and scrapes of a life well-lived!"

"It has things living _in_ it, you mean" Nynaeve suggested glibly.

 _That was quite uncalled for_ , Mat thought. He turned to address the Queen's handmaiden. "While you're at it, Shatayan Asara, please ask him to pick out a selection of sturdy leather boots to try for size." He favoured her with a bow and his best smile. It was important to keep the Shatayan happy, he knew. He'd learnt that the last time he'd been in the Borderlands, in Fal Dara.

The maid only sniffed in reply. Shatayans were haughtier than most queens, and they oversaw a royal household with a rod of iron. He turned back to Nynaeve, and then he noticed for the first time the suggestion of a bump around the Queen of Malkier's navel. That would explain a _lot._ Such as Nynaeve being nice to him! "Nynaeve… Are you..?"

"Am I what, Mat?" Nynaeve replied dangerously, reflexively reaching to tug a braid that no longer hung there. "Pregnant? Is that the word you're looking for? No, Mat. I just decided recently that I really love cake and decided to eat some morning, noon, and night. Yes, I'm pregnant."

"No. Yes. What I meant to say was that's great, Nynaeve. Congratulations to you and Lan." Mat recovered, smoothly he thought. Being married to Tuon had given him cause to practice. "How is old long, tall and ugly, anyway? he continued breezily.

"I'm doing just fine, sheepherder. Thanks for asking."

A voice like grit and sand. Of course. Lan _would_ pick that moment to enter the room _right_ behind him. Speak of _Caisen Hob,_ and he appears. Mat turned round like a startled tom-cat.

Lan was reassuringly Lan. All gristle and scars, all seven foot of him, Lan disdained the trappings of royalty, plainly dressed in good wool, and he still moved with that spooky deliberation that marked a Warder. A casual grace. Light on his feet as a weasel dancing to hypnotise its prey.

Lan was flushed, and there was perspiration on his brow, and Mat guessed he'd come here from the training-yard. His long hair was swordblade grey now, held back by the leather braid of a _hadori,_ but his eyes were keen, radiating control and focus, the ageless blue of Malkier's winter sky. He looked every inch the warrior he was. "Hello, Mat."

He offered a hand, and the two men clasped forearms in the warrior's grip, measuring their strength. "I have followed your career with interest, Matrim Cauthon. Not bad for a shepherd from the Two Rivers." Appraising eyes hardened. "Forgive the bluntness, Mat, but I have to ask what you are doing here? Lan Mandragoran and Mat Cauthon may be old friends who can reminisce about old times over a flagon of ale, but the King of Malkier must know what business the Raven Prince of Seanchan has with Malkier."

Mat met Lan's eyes and nodded seriously. Straight to business it was, then. "I understand, Lan. _Duty is heavier than a mountain, death lighter than a feather_." He sighed. "Very well. Sit down, al'Lan Mandragoran. You too, el'Nynaeve al'Meara. It is not a pretty tale, but it needs telling."

There was a rap upon the door, and an armoured Malkieri soldier pushed himself inside, breathless, doffing his helm respectfully as he addressed his liege lord. "My King. There are a man and a woman at the gate, demanding an audience."

The armsman paused, hesitating as he chose his words with the utmost care. Swallowed. "Sire, the man claims to be Rand al'Thor. The Dragon Reborn. We would have sent him on his way, but he .. he made a dead bush bloom. I swear to you, lord, I'm not making it up."

"Unbelievable, Mat!" Nynaeve raged. "You brought _that woman_ here? Do you even know what position you've put me in? Do you even _care_?

And it's not just me, Lan and our children, it's my _country_ you've put at risk _._ We don't even have diplomatic relations with Seanchan, as it stands, because of our association with the Aiel they skirmish with. They refuse our embassies! They're looking for any excuse for trouble. And you've just given Seanchan a legitimate reason to go to war with us! A war we cannot hope to win."

Mat stepped forward, standing nose to nose with the furious Queen, pointing his finger at her angrily. "Look. First off, 'that woman' is my _wife_. And technically, _I_ didn't bring her here. Rand did. Secondly, she is still Empress of Seanchan…"

Nynaeve laughed jaggedly, turning away and commenced pacing to and fro. "Don't give me that flannel! The instant Tuon channelled, any credibility her claim had vanished. You know as well as I that makes Mordred Emperor. I can't be seen to be harbouring her. I'm sorry Mat, you both have to leave here. I just don't get it, Mat. Why did you come here and put us – my family – in jeopardy?..."

She pointed to the clear sky outside, shivering abruptly and rubbing her forearms.. "You know that I can Listen to the Wind. My Talent. I know there's a storm coming, Mat – and it's not the weather. Something dark that is going to sweep us all away."

Mat met her angry eyes. "I feel it too, Nynaeve. In my bones. Min Foretold something. I didn't listen. Tried to ignore it. It's bigger than me and Tuon. Bigger than Malkier and Seanchan, maybe. If there's a storm coming, we'll face it together, as we always have. When the Dark rises, we Two Rivers folk stick together. Always have. Always will."

He saw Lan nodding fractionally in approbation, before catching a scalding glare from Nynaeve that made him take a sudden interest in a detail of the wood carving. The silence stretched.

"What is it?" Nynaeve barked in exasperation. This last was directed in response to a tentative rap on the door. "Yes, come in." Nynaeve snapped irritably. "Why not? The more the merrier! You'd think I was running a Baerlon alehouse rather than a flaming country!"

It was Tuon and Rand. Mat only had eyes for his spouse, an agonised glance that took in her dishevelled appearance, the scraps of linen that bound her wrists. Her unfocused, haunted gaze. This was not the Tuon he remembered. Spiritless, listless. Her brown eyes downcast. Bruised. Two strides and his arms were locked around her, clutching her to him. "Ah, Tuon, what have they done to you?"

She was rigid in his embrace, as if unable to draw comfort from it. Gently, he took her head in his hands, the fuzz of her short hair bristling against his palms. With a visible effort, she tilted her head up to meet his concerned gaze. She looked.. lost. With an effort, she dragged the words out, her delivery slurred. "They stilled me, Knotai."

Mat rounded on Nynaeve. " _That's_ why I came here, Nynaeve!" he snarled. "Because as far as I know, you are the only person that can heal Severing. Because you're the only Aes Sedai except Bode that I would trust with something like this. _Please._ Heal her, and we'll be on our way. I swear it. I'm begging you."

Nynaeve stopped pacing, her face conflicted. "Light, Mat. I'm not heartless" she said eventually. "I'll help her, if I can." She looked at Tuon grimly. "Not for her sake. Too many women have suffered the leash because of her. But for yours." She paused. "But afterwards, the pair of you must leave. I'll arrange a Gateway to take you wherever you need to go. Anywhere outside of Malkier and the Two Rivers…."

A longer pause. "Mat. Trying to Heal Tuon…. I might not be able to. Because I'm pregnant. It affects my control of the Power. And the Healing weave is complicated and power-intensive. I might burn myself out trying" she admitted.

Lan's craggy face became bleak, etched with an expression Mat had never seen before. Fear. She held a palm up to Lan, forestalling his protests. "Peace, husband. Please understand. I have to do this. It is who I am. A Healer. It is how I fight the Shadow. A part of it, anyhow."

There were tears in Lan's eyes now, frustration and fear warring with pride. He bowed to her. " _Tai'shar_ Manetheren" he whispered to his wife.

"No, my love" Nynaeve corrected him gently. "I belong to you, now, and Malkier is the mother that will welcome me home when my time comes."

She turned to Tuon. "Come forward, Tuon, and let me look at you."

Obediently, Tuon came forward, smoothing her smock anxiously. Fear of _marath'damane_ was ingrained in her psyche. Now she was putting herself in the care of one. _A pregnant marath'damane that might not be able to control the Power she wielded. Light!_

 _No_ , Tuon corrected herself. This woman deserved better than her fear and inculcated prejudice. She was willing to risk her own life – even that of her unborn child – to help an enemy for a friend. She raised her eyes to the Malkieri queen. "You remind me of her" she said quietly to Nynaeve. "This woman I once met."

Nynaeve assessed her coolly. "Who?" she inquired.

"A _marath_.. The former Amyrlin, Egwene al'Vere. I couldn't stand her" Tuon stated baldly. Nynaeve raised an eyebrow. Mat winced, trying to catch Tuon's eye. _You're going to talk yourself out of getting Healed, if you're not careful,_ Mat fretted desperately.

Of course, Tuon likely didn't know that she was setting about insulting the memory of Nynaeve's deceased childhood friend.

"She, too, was haughty and arrogant. We spoke for all of a minute, a negotiation to ensure that we fought the Shadow together and not each other. And near ended concluding matters pulling out each other's hair like a couple of tavern wenches..."

Nynaeve's eyebrow could not have climbed any higher and her foot was tapping. _Definitely a bad sign_ , Mat despaired. There were certain women who plain should not be allowed in the same room as each other. "…After, I came to realise," Tuon continued, "she was the woman who made perhaps the greatest contribution to defeating the Shadow. I didn't like her, but I have come to respect her the most of all."

"Hmm.." Nynaeve looked back at Tuon sceptically. "Then why have you not freed your _damane_ if you respected Egwene so much?"

"Because I only began to understand recently." Tuon admitted. "It was easier not to think about the ramifications of her sacrifice before. Until.."

"Hah." Nynaeve muttered. "Until you had first-hand experience of life wearing the collar!"

"Yes." Tuon admitted. "Until I wore the leash. But I'm not a hypocrite. Hate me for what I've done if you will, but I believed in what I was doing at the time. At first, I thought they were right to collar me. But then I started to think about what she did. Now, I don't think _marath.._ those with the gift of channelling .. should be collared."

Nynaeve favoured Tuon with a cynical look. "This is you practicing your re-election speech? Plotting your comeback? Regaining the Crystal Throne?"

"No" Tuon said, starkly, surprised to find herself opening up to the hostile Malkieri queen. Wanting to explain herself. It was the first conversation of note she'd had with a _marath'damane_ save that with Egwene.

"They'd never accept a _marath'damane_ as Empress. I just want to find somewhere quiet to live out my days with Mat. Truth to tell, I never really wanted to be Empress in the first place. I just saw it as my duty, because I was the most fit candidate, and because I was born into the right family. That's how it works. I don't even want my son to fall, because as flawed as he is, he is the only person who has a chance of keeping my country whole."

Nynaeve looked right back at her. "I don't know if you're telling the truth, or if you're just a very accomplished liar, Tuon. I'd like to think there's something about you, and Mat, for all his faults, is a decent judge of character. …

You do understand, Tuon, if this Healing works, you're going to be able to channel. In fact, since you've already begun, you're going to need to learn, or you will sicken and die. You could do a lot worse than emulate Egwene al'Vere. She was my friend – did you already know that when you made that pretty little speech?

No matter. We grew up together. She was everything you say, and more. Thank you for comparing me to her. There could not be a greater compliment. Now, shall we begin?" she said briskly.

Tuon nodded wordlessly, and Nynaeve stepped forward, jaw set in determination, and took hold of Tuon's shoulders, drawing a deep breath, seeking the Void. _Calm. Visualise the blackthorn bud. Feed your emotions into it._ Novice exercises, yet the Void fluttered, harmonics of her heartbeat, and that of the daughter in her belly. It was hard to keep the image of the flower bud constant.

 _Saidar_ seized her, flaring wildly, and Nynaeve concentrated as hard as she ever had in her life, trying not to be swept away. _It's not going to work. I'm going to still myself. If I'm lucky, and don't end up killing myself, the baby and Tuon!_ She rejected the thought. _I'm a Healer of the Yellow Ajah. I was born to do this!_ Before her nerve failed her, she felt for the short within Tuon, Delving her gently with Spirit.

The other woman was a torment of emotional pain, malnourished too. The break was an awful thing. A ragged wound beneath her fingers. Whoever had done the severing had hacked at Tuon's connection to _saidar_ like a man sawing at a gamy piece of meat with a blunt knife. Deliberate cruelty.

It made Nynaeve _angry._ Enraged! Gave her the focus she needed. The Malkieri queen seized a hundred infinitesimal threads of the Power. Fire. Spirit. Water. Air. Earth. Common Healing used but Spirit, Water and Air. What she was doing was like weaving a dozen tapestries at once, compared to crudely suturing a cut.

 _Saidar_ surged, but she mastered the flows, weaving as dextrously as she ever had, laying the ends of the weave upon the edges of the wound. The roughness of the wound actually helped the Healing take.

Another flare of the Power, and she nearly lost control. There was deep emotion within the Void. Something that had never happened before. Love for Lan, and for the daughter that grew within her. She felt that somehow, inexplicably, the child dimly understood her mother's struggle, was lending her strength.

No, not strength. _Awareness_. Nynaeve felt far more attuned, even as she combated the dangerous tidal forces of _saidar,_ both to the child and to Tuon, and the weave fell into place with a feeling of perfection, of _rightness,_ of _righteousness._ She Delved Tuon again, knowing what she would find. A restored connection within the Seanchan woman, a conduit for the One Power.

What she found shocked her. Tuon was _strong._ It couldn't be! Before her stilling, her strength had been inconsequential. Nynaeve had felt that as she sought to repair the damage. As weak as Morgase. Far too weak to test for the shawl. Now…. She was as strong as Vandene. Strong enough to open a Gateway, if she had the Talent!

Nynaeve released the Power. Opened her eyes. Drew a shuddering breath of pure, unadulterated relief. Lan was by her side in a flash, concern in her eyes. "Are you well?" he asked her anxiously.

Her grin was answer enough. "I'm great" she told him sunnily. "As for you, Tuon" she turned to her charge. "you're as good as new. Better, even. You can feel it, right?"

Tuon seized Nynaeve in a hug, wreathed in a beafitic smile. "Oh, thankyou" she breathed.

"Err. You're welcome" Nynaeve said briskly, extricating herself as delicately as possible. "About what I said earlier. _Definitely,_ you need to find someone to teach you to channel safely. Or you'll throw away all my hard work."

"But" Tuon said hesitantly, "I'm not that strong in the Power. The _sul'dam_ said I was too weak to make a worthwhile _damane._ "

"Well… you are now. For some reason, the Healing has made you stronger than before. I have no idea why. That's never happened before."

"How strong?" Tuon asked sharply.

Nynaeve's laughter was unfeigned. "Ah. _That's_ the Empress of Seanchan asking the question. The use of power is an addiction, isn't it? You will be strong indeed. Not as strong as me, mind, but stronger than most Aes Sedai. In potential, at least."

Tuon nodded soberly. "Strong enough to make a difference, then. To do some good."

Nynaeve gave her an enigmatic look. "And that, perhaps, is the woman that Mat sees. Never forget it."


	30. Chapter 30: Supping With The Devil

**Chapter 30: Supping with the Devil**

Moghedien had passed a fitful, restless night. After her outburst in the Garden, Semirhage had been coldly angry for the next two hours. Moghedien kept quiet, waiting for Semirhage's inevitable retaliation for her defiance, which never came, keyed up to a pitch of anxiety and watchfulness.

After that, Semirhage appeared to relent, sloughing off her cold demeanour like the skin of a serpent, reverting to her version of bonhomie, playing the cordial host. Knowing the Lady of Pain as she did, Moghedien's concern was not assuaged in the slightest. Semirhage never forgot a perceived injury, and her reprisals for slights were the stuff of dark legend.

The previous day had been an endless procession of horrors, mind-games and mind-numbing, paralysing fear. They had visited the Hall of the Servants, where Mesaana ruled her fiefdom as the Amyrlin Seat.

Semirhage took pains to stress to Moghedien that Mesaana held her post at her sufferance, as her vassal. The Lady of Pain had her own suite of rooms in the White Tower, including the former Amyrlin's study and sleeping quarters, relegating Mesaana to what had once been the Mistress of Novices' apartment.

* * *

Mesaana sat on the Amyrlin's throne in the Hall of the Servants, appearing to the eye as a deific figure in a stole of writhing night, her face sheathed behind a caul of shadows, through which only her eyes – liquid pools of opaque silver, gleaming balefully – could be discerned.

It was only the Mask of Mirrors, Moghedien knew, an inverted web of _saidar_. Just an illusion, but it still made Moghedien shiver momentarily when those blank eyes alighted on her in dreadful benediction, weighing her before summarily dismissing her as of no moment with a regal motion of one alabaster long-fingered hand which trailed tendrils of eldritch night.

Moghedien had little love for those who called themselves Aes Sedai, but even she was chilled to observe the functioning of the new regime, under the Shadow Amyrlin. Say what you would about Mesaana, she got things done.

The White Tower was nearly filled again, their ranks bolstered by hundreds of terrified Novices and Accepted, frightened little girls who had been abducted from their homes, who cowered in terror whenever they saw the shawl of an Aes Sedai. Mesaana's scouting parties were expert, picking over every town and village and taking every girl who had the ability. The younger the better. It made them more pliable. "Give me the child at ten, and I will give you the woman" was Mesaana's creed.

The process of indoctrination was as important in the new order as lessons in the Power, their training designed to inculcate loyalty only to the Great Lord and to Mesaana herself. Bullying and informing on others was both promoted and encouraged. The Accepted and Aes Sedai, battling the early onset of madness, had just cause for their paranoia, and they responded to the threat posed by their students with torment and cruelty, trying to crush any nascent challenge before it raised its head.

In an Age long past, Mesaana had been Saine Tarasind Aes Sedai, a teacher at the prestigious Collam Daan university. Despite great strength in the One Power, she had earned neither a coveted research post nor a _cognomen –_ the formal accolade of a third name – unlike most of those who came to stand amongst the Chosen. Overlooked, underestimated, consigned to spend her days teaching the works of supposedly greater minds in obscurity, working from the shadows – much like Moghedien herself – Mesaana's real talents were bureaucratic.

She might not be as stellar as a Lanfear, but Mesaana was methodical and patient with an eye for details and an eidetic memory, reading the changing currents of politics astutely. Those who sneered at her as a mere functionary – perceiving her as the weakest amongst the Chosen – neglected to observe that she was a skilled operator. She had proven to be a competent ruler – unlike many amongst the Forsaken – and the pogroms she had utilised to subjugate and control a captive population through the judicious application of suspicion and fear, honed and refined, were those she employed to rule as Amyrlin.

It was gloomy in the great hall, and cold. Light was provided by glowtubes mounted into brackets on the wall that sputtered a dull copper glow in fitful life. A relic of the Age of Legends, their presence here was an ostentatious display of Mesaana's wealth and sophistication, but practically-speaking, better illumination would have been provided by the primitive expedient of burning brands. The inert argon gas that filled the transparent tubes had leaked over the aeons, meaning the radiance of the glowtubes was a dull, desultory orange instead of the startling white glare they had once possessed.

In the corners and crevices of the Hall, the flickering shadows cast by the glowtubes lingered suggestively, giving the semblance of malevolent, sentient life haunting the gloom. Watching and listening.

There were paw-prints upon the floor, imprinted into the very flagstones. Darkhounds. Two of the terrifying creatures lolled at the foot of Mesaana's throne. Another paced through the assembled Aes Sedai – high-ranking judging by their age and strength in the Power – who constituted Mesaana's Hall of the Tower. A bleak perversion of the original body of elder Aes Sedai which was intended to provide a check on the Amyrlin's power, this rabble were no more than Mesaana's flunkies and hangers-on.

The stalking Darkhound brushed past Moghedien with an entitled arrogance, brindled pelt bristling against her bare leg as it seeped through the throng like a wisp of noxious smoke. It stopped to sniff at her, relishing the sour savour of her fear, prognathous maw appearing to smile malevolently as pestilential saliva dripped from its muzzle to spatter the floor at her feet, the bitter acid pitting the stone it fell upon. It had been all she could do not to bolt and run screaming.

That would have been a terrible mistake, underscored by what had happened next. A girl Novitiate with braided hair dropped a cup of scented wine she was bearing to an Aes Sedai and shrieked in terror when she saw the hulking apparition sniffing at her shoulder.

That had been the only invitation the Darkhound needed, springing upon its hapless victim as the press of Aes Sedai edged cautiously backwards, and bearing her to the floor. Nobody intervened as the beast worried at the still-living girl, jaws biting deep into her torso with relish as it tugged free a glistening string of intestines.

It was an assembly of the elder Aes Sedai, those who had been channelling corrupted _saidar_ the longest. A pageant of the damned. Many of those present stood in pairs – linked by the _a'dam_ 's unequal yoke _._ As Semirhage had told her, the leashed women were those whom the madness had fully claimed, those who were too unstable to be allowed their freedom, but women whose abilities were still of use. Those with considerable strength, or those with rare and useful Talents, too precious to be wastefully destroyed.

One such woman, a round-cheeked Cairhenien, sat naked and slack-faced in a puddle of her own urine, her Leash Holder sparing her only the occasional look of contempt. Another woman with her hands bound together behind her back knelt, hunched, rocking back and forth, banging her head dully, rhythmically against the wall. When she looked up, Moghedien saw with revulsion that her eye-sockets were empty hollows. This unfortunate had gouged her own eyes out.

Clustered about the dais, a coterie of the saner Aes Sedai fawned upon their Amyrlin, keeping a watchful eye on the lazing Darkhounds who lounged at her feet. One bite of those jaws could sever an arm, or a leg. And those bitten would die a vile and lingering death. Darkhound saliva was one of the most potent toxins known. Even a drop could kill, and Healing didn't work on Darkhound bites.

It was a barbarous environment that fostered tension, that played jarringly upon the nerve endings, and Moghedien, who was a creature of instinct felt it more keenly than most, her wakeful, wary eyes darting, chasing the shadows haunting her peripheral vision. Figments of a sleepless night? Suggestions implanted in her consciousness by Semirhage to oppress her mind, and drive her into the embrace of madness? Moghedien didn't know.

Her eyes prickled, rubbed red-raw from lack of sleep and nerves, and her nose ran ceaselessly – a byproduct of the histamines her body was producing to keep her awake, Semirhage had informed her knowingly.

This was a real Hob's court, baroquely seductive, thrumming with the resonance of real power, and her guide was _Shai'tan_ herself, the tall dark woman with a scalpel smile. Even the Darkhounds made way for her, the Spider observed uneasily, cringing and fawning as they did so. A display of subservience from revenants that only Balefire could kill. _Impressive._

It was a pity, Moghedien thought regretfully, that Mesaana had not wished to talk with her. It indicated that Mesaana did not intend to conspire against Semirhage. Yet on the other hand, it was transparently obvious to the Spider that Semirhage's lieutenant was busy building an army. Thousands of Aes Sedai and Accepted, loyal to Mesaana alone.

The Lady of Pain affected not to notice the machinations of her underling. Semirhage surely could not be that naïve, so the only conclusion the Spider could draw was that Mesaana had been somehow nullified as a threat. Moghedien could only speculate as to how. What hold did Semirhage have over Mesaana – aside from being _Nae'blis_ – that ensured her loyalty? That let Semirhage sleep beneath her vassal's roof, surrounded by hundreds of Mesaana's subjects with impunity?

 _Ah._ The answer, when it came was simplicity itself. It was the Darkhound pack. They belonged to Semirhage, not Mesaana whom they gave the appearance of guarding. In reality, they were her jailors, placed where they could observe the Amyrlin night and day. Darkhounds could understand the tongue of men, as well as the Black Speech of the Trollocs, though they could not themselves speak, so Mesaana could not overtly plot against her mistress.

Darkhounds were notoriously hard to kill. Seemingly formed of the Shadow itself, even if cut into pieces by blades or the Power, their matter liquefied, pooled and quickly reconstituted themselves once more.

Balefire alone sufficed to kill them, because it destroyed a living object as a whole ensemble. Even an Aes Sedai of the strength and craft of Mesaana would find disposing of an entire Pack of Darkhounds to be a challenge. And slaying them would notify Semirhage that Mesaana was in open rebellion against the _Nae'blis_.

* * *

Moghedien and Semirhage had supped privately in the Amyrlin's quarters. The rooms had been lavishly furnished and appointed to create an intimate space, in contrast to the ascetic preferences of the previous tenant, Alviarin Friedhen – an Amyrlin raised from the White, of six Ajahs and none, before she had cast off the stole to reveal her true allegiance.

Alviarin, the Black Swan – who had by treachery supplanted her predecessor, by treachery supplanted in her turn. Thus turned the Broken Wheel, and the Great Lord was served.

The walls were draped with exotic fabrics – streith and fancloth – gently undulating with the convection of the air-currents from the hearth-fire, the priceless fabrics pulsing, redolent with colour like the beating of a secret heart. One wall was dominated by a projection screen that was currently playing a romantic film with the sound muted. A dresser of scented dark wood was topped with a collection of priceless _cuendillar_ ornaments, and a call-box.

For all the trappings of wealth on display, it was cluttered to Moghedien's eyes. Insecure. A nostalgic attempt to resurrect a past that had perhaps only truly existed in the mind of Semirhage. _Ah, Nemene,_ Moghedien mused to herself, _you are human, after all._ A heartening thought.

They had been waited upon by wooden-faced servants, who performed impeccably. As well they might under the bonds of Compulsion. Compulsion made for incorruptible subjects, who would never divulge what they overheard whilst serving their mistress, and who were unstinting in their application to the tasks assigned to them.

The food was good, even excellent, though Moghedien had little appetite – partridge and chestnut mushrooms, served in a red wine and garlic sauce. The Spider chewed the flesh of the fowl, half-heartedly, but eschewed the mushrooms. They were a tacit reminder of Semirhage's garden. A subtle hint that nothing was forgotten or forgiven. Nothing was accidental when it came to the Lady of Pain.

There had been wine too, a rich dark red in a clay pitcher. Moghedien sipped sparingly where Semirhage was unstinting. Semirhage was garrulous in her cups, even charming, her dark eyes sparkling with unfeigned gaiety. Her shaper's hands were animated as she talked. It was a side to Semirhage few people got to see.

It surprised many who knew the reputation of the Lady of Pain, to find her such an empathetic hostess, skilled at drawing a person out of her reticence. One could almost forget the true character of the woman.

It was, Moghedien reminded herself, just another tool in the arsenal of a serial manipulator and sociopath. When it came to Semirhage, you could never, ever let your guard down. Not for a single instant. _When you sup with the Devil, best use a long spoon._ About the only thing you could rely upon was that Semirhage was a stickler for observing the conventions, the forms of things. If she invited you to table, she wasn't about to kill you. Not yet, anyway.

Moghedien's noncommittal responses to Semirhage's conversational gambits irritated the _Nae'blis,_ who affected not to notice, though a slight tightening around the eyes gave her pique away. In response, Semirhage insisted on making eye contact, occasionally pawing at Moghedien's hands when she was making a point. Small acts of flirtatiousness. Little things to discomfort the Spider.

At a nod from the Lady of Pain, a male and female servant began to copulate, their movements mechanical, automatic despite the graphic acts they were performing. Idly, Semirhage reached out to caress the flank of the man as she turned towards Moghedien, beginning yet another inane question.

It had been an interminable meal. What had followed was worse.

Compelled servants had led her – not to her comfortable though plain sleeping-quarters of the previous night, but to a white-walled room with a door that locked on the outside. She had a bed – and a thin linen coverlet to sleep under – if she could manage to sleep in what was clearly one of Semirhage's operating theatres, where she worked upon her patients.

Moghedien informed the servants they had made a mistake, and demanded to be taken to her quarters of the previous night. They politely but firmly demurred – as Moghedien knew they would – insisting no mistake had been made. There was nothing to be done – short of defying Semirhage outright – Moghedien knew, so with an ill grace, she stalked wordlessly into the room.

The door closed behind her with a finality accentuated by the scraping rasp of the heavy bolts being engaged, locking her into the room. She was alone, though she could feel the weight of observant eyes upon her through the pry-hole in the door.

Undressing into her shift, Moghedien crawled under the thin blanket, drawing her knees to her chest for warmth in the frigid room. She wondered if Semirhage herself was watching her. A thought to chill the warmest heart.

Feeling discomfort, Moghedien became aware of a spreading dampness against her side where it pressed into the hard mattress beneath her and drew back the sheets. With distaste, she saw the mattress was stained with blood, a patch about the size of the palm of her hand. Blood which was still wet. It didn't take a lot of imagination to guess what had happened to the room's previous occupant. _The last thing to happen to them, anyway._

With a shudder of revulsion, Moghedien grabbed her dress from the floor – the clean clothing which Semirhage had provided for her – and put it over the stain before climbing back into the cot. Her head was buzzing somnolently, and she felt dizzy. Was it the wine? Surely not. She wasn't accustomed to drinking, but she'd barely touched her glass all evening.

It hadn't been the wine, she realised as – instead of abating – her symptoms grew more accentuated. The room dipped and yawed on its axis like the cabin of a ship upon the Sea of Storms, and the harsh glare of the neon glowtube strobed and flared. In an all-too-brief period of lucidity, Moghedien realised that Semirhage had fed her a powerful hallucinogen – probably in the mushrooms which had garnished her food.

Stumbling reeling from the bed, Moghedien put her fingers down her throat, forcing herself to regurgitate the poisoned food as she gagged and heaved. It was too late, she knew, the psychoactive compound was already in her blood. The most she could hope for was to mitigate how bad the trip would be, and that was a faint hope indeed.

Her legs and body felt wooden, frozen. Disconnected. But her head was afire, her forehead fevered. Throbbing. She made it back to the bed, drunkenly clinging to the wall and sat on the end of the cot, breathing hard, shaking. Her heart was hammering in her breast, her pulse thrumming high and light. She was sheened with sweat as if she had run a mile. What had Semirhage _done_ to her?

Moghedien felt a hand upon her upper thigh, squeezing intimately on the bare flesh just below the hem of her shift, and she screamed – or would have if the extremity of her terror and violation had not robbed the breath from her lungs. What came out was an impotent, strangled gasp.

With a cruel insistent slowness, the coarse fingers of the hand eased under the hem of the fabric, began inching up her leg. Caressing. Lustful, excited breathing in her ear. She didn't dare look around.

Desperately, Moghedien grasped for _saidar,_ just as she had thousands of years ago, but she couldn't even find the Void. In her intoxicated extremity, it shattered like glass, spearing her mind agonizingly with a hundred thousand tiny flakes of crystal. She wasn't Moghedien any more. She was Lilen Moiral once again. A frightened, powerless, pitiful _victim_.

The pressure of the invading hand disappeared in the chime of Semirhage's cruel laughter, which fragmented into echoes which sounded like the calls of birds and the insectile fluttering of a hundred butterfly wings, growing more and more dissonant, metallic and alien, before they faded away altogether, leaving her becalmed in a silence that rang in her ears.

But it was a long time – Minutes? Hours? – before Moghedien gathered the courage to turn her head, to check her phantom assailant had truly departed from her.

The empty cot and the sterile walls of an unoccupied room mocked her fear and horror.

Presaged by a chthonic grinding, the earth opened up to engulf her. The ceiling bore down upon her, the starkly lime-washed surface abruptly becoming more and more rugged as jagged stalagtites punched through the peeling, seething surface, spears of calcified rock lancing downwards seeking to impale her.

At the same time, the floor beneath her feet was subsiding, falling away into black nothingness, as if a vacuum was sucking the matter into itself, and Moghedien scrabbled backwards away from where the hungry vortex was consuming the ground, into the corner of the room, where she could run no further.

A stalagtite smashed through the cot where she had been sitting just moments before, the force buckling the iron frame of the bed as it embedded itself into the floor beneath. But Moghedien only had eyes for the grasping crevasse yawning wide before her, as the lip of the floor in front of her bare feet crumbled apart, disintegrating, the pieces falling into the depthless abyss below her. It was the Great Lord. Angry with her failure.

She could feel Him. Feel the maelstrom, the clutching magnetism, the unslakeable hunger to unmake, mar and corrupt. And this time, she knew, he would give her to Shaidar Haran as a plaything.

The Dark Lord's avatar might be the foreshadow of a deity, but his hungers – as well as his form – wore the semblance of humanity. For a mercifully brief time, she had been given to the Hand of the Dark as punishment by Moridin. A time she had almost succeeded in blotting from memory. There were things worse than even the _cour'souvra_. Shaidar Haran was one of those things….

 _(..please, anything but him. Mercy. I'll do anything, Great Lord. I'm begging you. Anything you want, but don't give me to Shaidar Haran…)_

The shadow fell over her as she cringed helplessly. Shaidar Haran was here for her. She could smell his carrion breath as it blasted against her cheek. Hear his voice, grating like tortured steel giving way, clogging like coagulated blood sluicing through an abattoir's gutters.

MY LITTLE MOGHEDIEN. MY TOY. HOW I HAVE LONGED FOR YOU. IT HAS BEEN TOO LONG.

 _(…give me back to Mistress Shanan. Shut me back up in the box. Beat me. Starve me. Anything but Him…)_

His long-fingered nail scraped her chin possessively, pressing just hard enough to draw blood. Forcing her to look upwards into Shaidar Haran's eyeless face.

There was something singularly loathsome about the avatar's visage that transcended description, even compared with other Myrddraal. That cadaverous, waxy flesh. Those vulpine teeth that loved to bite, and bite.

But it was the chthonic delight, the unlight, in those eye-sockets that paralysed you with fear. That turned your muscles to water, robbed your autonomy, made you unable to resist, even flee. Those sockets were filled with a terrible knowing. A corrosive insanity. A manifest cruelty. There was a lunatic joy in that awful voice.

 _(..please kill me. Just let me die…..)_

NOW YOU ARE MINE TO AMUSE ME, ONCE MORE, MOGHEDIEN. FOREVER. THERE WILL BE NO DEATH. ONLY ME.


	31. Chapter 31: Ignorance Is Bliss

**Chapter 31: Ignorance Is Bliss**

 _Ignorance,_ so the saying went, _is bliss._

Beca Koukal groaned. She broiled in a pool of sunshine that was lensing emerald through the thick glass of her window. Awkwardly she tried to roll away from the tormenting light, alcohol-poisoned muscles feeble and unresponsive, her legs tangled in the bedsheets.

Thrashing like a worm, she managed to extricate herself, at the expense of spilling over the lip of the mattress and crashing awkwardly onto the hard wood of the floor on her side. Her arm took the brunt of the impact as she fell awkwardly.

Beca winced as she rolled her shoulder experimentally, work-hardened muscles knotted like cord. She was going to have a rare bruise, that was for sure.

She dragged herself upright, feeling vertigo from the sudden movement, rubbing sleep from her eyes as she peered about as blearily as a sun-struck mole. She felt as if her wine-parched throat had been first desiccated and then sandpapered. _Water!_

Beca saw a pitcher on the table, and she made an ungainly grab for it, some of the liquid inside sloshing out of the container onto the surface as she dragged the drinking vessel to her, setting the lip of the clay jug to her chapped lips and tipping the beaker up.

Too late, the eye-watering tang of neat apple brandy registered on her senses as she took a greedy mouthful. Her eyes streamed and she spluttered fitfully as she took a deep draught of the ammonia-strong cheap spirit, brandy running indecorously down her chin. _Light_!It even burnt her skin! Hob alone knew what it was doing to her insides.

Still, it might keep sobriety at bay, and that was _always_ a good thing in her extensive experience of the morning-after-the-night-before. A golden truth. She had a feeling that there were a goodly number of things from the previous night she had no wish to remember.

Beca took another swig. It didn't taste any better, but the spirit enervated her with a cheap, temporary burst of useful energy. _Hair of the dog, Beca darlin'. Hair of the bloody dog. Let's be having you._

Beca pushed herself groggily to her feet and stood up, shambling like a spent prizefighter, feeling the forge-hammer cacophony of a prize hangover between her ears as a result of her sudden movement. She became aware of a dreadful racket emanating from the heap of tangled bedclothes. It sounded not unlike a couple of badgers mating. _Sweet loving Light._

"Shut up" she muttered, pleadingly. "For the love of …"

There were a pair of large, bare and quite dirty feet protruding from the end of the bedroll. Men's feet. _Ah._ A helpful reminder of how she had passed the time last night.

Big feet, big …. A girl could hope!

Her erstwhile bedfellow grunted. Turned over. Continued snoring.

Wincing at the pain it caused, she raised her voice in what was intended to be her best parade-ground bark, berating the sleeping figure. "Oi, bollockchops! Shut your yap!" It came out as a rooster-like squark, which hurt her vocal cords, and painfully increased the pressure in her wine-swollen head.

For a precious moment, there was blissful silence, then a porcine grunt of incomprehension from the sleeping satyr in the bed, followed by another rasping snore. Like the Dark One's carpenter sawing a cross-grained Ogier from stem to stern, it was. It sparked Beca's notoriously incendiary temper like flame applied to a Dragon's Egg.

Sweeping up the man's dirty boots (which she saw had tracked mud in a shambling bear's dance across the neatly-swept pinewood floor) she heaved them at what she guessed was the man's head.

One of the heavy leather boots struck true with a dull thud, the other clattering off the bed's solid wooden headboard. "Get _up_ , you sow's bastard! On your feet, soldier!" she bellowed.

That turned the trick. The luckless man sat bolt upright as if _Tarmon Gai'don_ had descended upon him, looking about him in startlement, eyes alarmed beneath a tangle of straw-coloured hair. He shot from his blankets like a ferret from a box, as he reflexively stood to attention beside the bed, stark-bollock naked, his wick waving in the wind. "Yes, Standard-Bearer!" he sounded off as his feet hit the floor.

 _A truly pitiable sight_ , thought Beca Surehand as she looked at her bedfellow with a rueful eye. He was as scrawny as a plucked chicken, all skin and bone, this young lad. As far as she could tell, his only distinguishing feature was the size of his feet. Big as dinner plates, thon.

"It's Banner-General, soldier" she muttered darkly. Yet her anger was dissipating as quickly as it had been provoked as the young man stammered out his apologies. "At ease, soldier" she bade him, dryly. Amusingly, the young man's first action was to cover his privates with both hands.

In a gentler tone, Beca took charge. "Just get dressed, man, and go, would you?" she ordered, and he bobbed a bow as he expostulated. "Yes, High Lady.. err.. Banner-General..At once…" He struggled into his clothes as quickly as he had divested them the previous night, and bolted for the door, which slammed behind his rapid exit.

Beca was amused to see he left one of his boots behind in his haste to flee the scene. She thought of calling after him, then dismissed the notion.

* * *

'High Lady'? _Well, she certainly was that, for whatever it was worth_ , Beca stewed glumly, the brief surrusus of amusement all too quickly subsumed in a slough of despond.

The depression enforced by the sudden onset of sobriety brought its own stark, ruthless clarity, stripped of all the comforting, insulating little lies that keep a person content. Being raised to the Blood had been about the worst thing that could have happened to her. She was a soldier, as plain and practical as a pair of stout marching-boots, as unsubtle and direct as the forge-wrought steel on her left hip.

Being a High Lady hadn't been so bad when they were still at war. It hadn't really mattered. Truth to tell, nobody in the Banner had treated her any differently – nor had she wanted them to, in all honesty, after the first flush of being raised. What had happened to her was a lucky accident, that was all – something that could have happened to anyone in the Winged Hammer. The Light knew there were plenty as deserving as her, many more so.

But, that was a soldier's lot. Grizzled Jaim, her file-leader had given it to her straight when she was a green recruit. "You're a soldier now, girl, and a soldier doesn't get what they wants, nor what they deserves, mostly. A soldier gets what they gets."

Mostly, what a soldier got was injured and pensioned-off, or dead. Sometimes, the lucky ones got rich, or even famous (though that could be as much a blessing as a curse, Beca knew). Occasionally, promoted. And very, very rarely, someone like her was noticed by royalty and Raised to the Blood.

After the war, that was when Beca became aware just what a life-changing event it had truly been. Suddenly, she belonged to an entirely different strata of society from the rankers she had served with. They wouldn't carouse with her any longer. Instead, they observed that damned _sei'moisev_ around her, lowering their eyes deferentially.

High Lord Uthair had been a generous patron, she allowed. He remembered the obligation he had to her, and provided her a modest allowance so she could support the lifestyle expected of her as a low-ranked Blood noble.

It was an obligation that cut both ways, Beca knew, for all that the young Prince – Emperor now – seemed to have a real respect for her. He provided her station in peace, as he had in war, and she was expected to be loyal to him politically. As he rose, so would she. And if he fell, well…

As for the lifestyle…. Pah! She had been raised a farm girl, before sheer boredom had driven her into the arms of the military, and she hadn't looked back. Neither occupation befitted her for life as a noblewoman, where she was _expected_ to throw around money like a drunken sailor on shore-leave. It went against every frugal, hard-bitten instinct.

Another unexpected thing was how _vicious_ court life was. As a young girl, helping out around the farm, she had often fed the chickens and collected their eggs. She observed how one of the birds – smaller, weaker, albino – was always singled out by the flock and tormented for its differences by the others. Once the pecking-party started, it would not end until the bullied bird was killed, or driven off. That was what court life was. One grand pecking-party.

And Beca was the runt of the litter, the little, shabby, dun-coloured chicken the rest of the birds singled out for harassment. Life in the Banner just hadn't been like that. It couldn't be – not when you depended on the soldier next to you to have your back. Sure, there were bullies – there were everywhere, in every walk of life – but bullies tended to be cowards. They didn't tend to last long. Very prone to unfortunate accidents, and the like.

Life at Court was a lonely existence, where everything she did was scrutinized, criticised and reported-upon. Where her shortcomings reflected not only upon herself, but upon her patron as well. Carousing, helling and bedding likely-looking lads – all those things that had given her release now lowered her eyes. She was lonely, and oh sweet Light above was she bored!

She had no friends, and plenty of foes. Along with Uthair's favour, she had inherited all Uthair's enemies among the High Blood. Real nobles that could trace their lineage back to Artur Hawkwing. Enemies that outranked her that she couldn't even stand up to. It was ironic that as a common soldier, she hadn't encountered the level of contempt from the Blood officers for her humble upbringings that she now faced daily. She had given them fealty, and they had given her respect. Whereas here, she was being treated like an upstart.

That had been bad enough, but now her patron was the Emperor Mordred, things had become harder, rather than easier. Her patron's exalted rank inflated her own social cachet. Though she remained Low Blood, Mordred's advancement to the Crystal Throne had made Beca proxy High Blood without her in reality being any such thing. It made life more difficult, not to mention more dangerous. Many thought she was privy to all kinds of privileged information, the kind of plots and entanglements that got a body strung up to cure from the Towers of Midnight like a fitch of bacon.

No longer was Beca responsible only for her own words and deeds. She was surrounded by an unwelcome coterie of hangers-on who hoped to profit from her position, and the rumours propagated by the more stupid ones amongst them put her directly in harm's way. Stupid, venal, amoral, cruel and dangerous little _bitches._ She'd driven away the more idiotic and loose-lipped ones. That only left the treacherous, conniving grifters to worry about.

* * *

The events of the previous night were swimming grudgingly back into focus. They hadn't been pretty, but were nothing if not memorable. It had been Deiria, of course. Doe-eyed Deiria, a willowy, elegant woman with a face that butter wouldn't melt. Appearances could be deceptive. High Lady Deiria was one of Beca's most obdurate antagonists, with a caustic tongue which could etch steel.

Beca had endured months of her criticism. You couldn't really call it an enmity. That required two contesting parties. It was an incessant, one-sided series of snubs, insults, snide comments and insinuations, and there was not a thing Beca could do about it. Deiria Aladon Tanreall was – as she never tired of pointing out to anyone who would listen – descended from Artur Hawkwing through both her mother and father's line.

The previous night had been interminable. Deiria had held court, distributing bon-mots to her hangers-on, barbs mostly targeting her. There had, Beca remembered, been a good deal of decent wine, and as the evening wore on, she had availed herself.

There had been a definite moment where Beca had realised she had better stop drinking, that cut-off point after which she knew she wouldn't be in full control of her faculties. _Sod it._ She was tired of restraint. Instead, she had taken another glass from the attendant _da'covale._ "Thank you" she addressed the servant, automatically.

Deiria sneered at her for the small courtesy. "Look. The farm girl even thanks _property_! How perfectly _common_! Ah, but if only she knew her station with those who are her betters."

Beca looked at the High Lady flatly over the rim of her cup. "We farm girls are taught that manners cost nothing. _High Lady_." That respectful salutation tagged on the end most _definitely_ an afterthought. As a soldier, you got a real feel for how to craft a good, full-bodied, well-rounded insult. That was how it had begun. And once the back-and-forth had started, there was only one possible outcome.

Beca didn't remember what exactly had been said that had been the final straw. Just a lot of carping, back-and-forth, and on her part, a _lot_ of drinking. Something about her broken nose? Yes, that was it. "You look like a pug dog, girl. It is a wonder you can breathe through that ugly snout of yours" Deiria had commented archly.

"You know what else is for free, High Lady? As well as the manners you lack? Broken noses. You want one of your very own?" Beca had found herself drunkenly retorting, lurching to her feet and confronting the High Lady, balling her hands and shaking her clenched fist under the startled noblewoman's own, perfectly aquiline, nose. "Reckon you are in dire need of both! I firmly believe in free cosmetic surgery for everyone, High Lady. Get up!" she dared her tormentor. "I'll break your _face_!"

With a shriek of rage, the High Lady's hand slashed out, lacquered nails raking down Beca's cheek. What had Beca truly intended to do? She didn't remember. Perhaps to break Deiria's nose as she had so rashly threatened. Nothing too serious, anyway.

Instead, combat reflexes had taken over, and she had seized the High Lady's arm in a vise-like wristlock, unceremoniously yanking her out of her chair, forcing the other woman's arm rigid before driving the blade of her forearm through Deiria's elbow joint. The sound of her arm breaking had been shockingly loud.

The High Lady had fainted outright as Beca dropped her, rounding on the other women angrily, fists clenched. "Do any of y'other bitches want some?" she challenged them, hands on her hips. Nobody met her eyes. "No? Thass wha' I thought."

She snagged a silver carafe from a _da'covale's_ tray, and took a swig. "Thanks, darlin'" she said, swinging back on the stunned noblewomen, levelling a belligerent finger at them. "See? Jus' manners."

After that, there had been a soldier. _Almost certainly_ the same one that had been in her bed this morning, snoring away for all he was worth. As Beca recalled it, she had pretty much ordered him to his task! Not that he was reluctant, mind. Man set to with a will!

By then, Beca had been doggedly intent on doing everything she had been denied from doing over the endless months since the war's end. _Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb_ had been her rationale at that point. There were going to be consequences. Serious ones, most like. But probably not until the morning. So she might as well enjoy herself first. Tomorrow could look after itself.

Of course, at bottom, the calamitous events of the previous night hadn't been about the High Lady at all.

* * *

Beca had been looking for a way out for a long time. Her predicament was such that she had entered a real Aelfinn's bargain with her patron. She had joined High Lord Uthair's cabal against the Empress and Raven Prince with open eyes. At the onset, it had not felt in the least treasonous. 'The heights are paved with daggers' – even little children knew this. Her loyalty was to her commander, not to his royal parents.

Her price was a simple one. She wanted command of the crack Winged Hammer banner, because it meant a permanent field command that would keep her far from the intrigues of court.

As Banner-General, Beca could look after the interests of her people better than any blueblood, better than Hawkwing herself, she daresay. And she had the necessary experience, it being the next lineal promotion from the rank she had left the army at, and it would be a vacant post, with the former commander High Lord Uthair becoming the Emperor Mordred.

The field command had proven to be yet another left-handed gift from Emperor Mordred. It wasn't Beca's place to judge him, she had believed. Until now. What she _could_ judge, however, was the effects their interactions had upon her life. The cost of the advancement had been a piece of her soul.

Yet Beca had but done her duty, as she had seen it, fighting alongside the _Gaidin_ to subdue Alcia, the Empress's bodyguard and the Raven Prince, the famed Maitrim Cauthon, the Son of Battles himself. It had been her sword that had plunged between Alcia's shortribs as she vainly tried to defend her royal mistress against both a Bladesmaster and Beca. A brave woman.

It hadn't been a fair fight. That didn't trouble Beca any. Battle was like that. You took any advantage that was offered, and thanked the Light that you got to see another sunrise. What had bothered her was the look on the Raven Prince's face. The incomprehension at his son's betrayal. High Lord Maitrim didn't play the Great Game. He was just another hapless victim of it.

And as Beca accompanied the newly-minted Emperor as he consolidated his hold on the Crystal Throne, a worse realisation had dawned as she observed Mordred politicking with not one but _two_ of the Forsaken themselves – not to mention brokering a dishonourable alliance with Shara with the aim of breaking the Dragon's Peace and attacking the Aiel who enforced it as well as neutral Malkier.

Beca was not a sophisticated woman, but her father had raised no fools, either. The only conclusion that made sense was that the Emperor was _Atha'an Shadar_. A Darkfriend.

That hurt. She had loved High Lord Uthair with an unquestioning, filial devotion, seeing the greatness in him. His ability to read a battle. His vigour and valour. His loyalty and humanity to the men under his command.

That man was gone, she now realised. Usurping his place was a brooding ruler, cold, calculating and void of emotion. A Stones player, poring over the board as he moved people like game-pieces. And what of her? What had she become?

She should leave. But where could she go? Become a sell-sword in the Westlands? Go home to rebuild a long-deserted farm? Neither were conscionable, or even realistic. Beca could never fight against the Raven Empire. The eternal struggle between Light and Shadow was academic to her, a thing of intangibles compared to the reality of her loyalty to the land of her birth. Nor did she know the first thing about raising a crop or tending livestock.

No, she was tethered to her fate. The thread of her life and that of the Emperor Mordred were inextricably entwined, she saw it now. All Beca could do now is what she had always done, all the days of her life:

Give loyal service, the best she knew how.

And make the best of it.


	32. Chapter 32: Rods and Axes

**Chapter 32: Rods and Axes**

The nameless plain, flat and fallow stretched to the horizon. Naked, exposed under the unfeeling grey iris of a sky some called heaven. Far to the east, where earth and sky met their asymptote, a shadow brooded on the lip of the world, intincting the horizon. Not a storm cloud, but the city of Ebou Dar seen from afar.

It was a poor place. Men give names to the things they covet, but none had cared enough to assign one to this bleak tract. Or perhaps they once had, and the land had sloughed it off. Another worn-out place, the few tatterdemalion spears of grass the same faded no-colour of the grudging soil they issued from. It was a place fit only for one thing. Dying. A battlefield or a boneyard.

The immensity of the waste mocked the scurrying activity of the horsemen who exercised here. In their dun grey cloaks, at first glance the lancers were an unprepossessing lot. The shouts of command, the warriors' cries as they rowelled the flanks of their mounts swallowed up into the empty vaults of sky and silence. Yet a practiced eye would see they shoaled like a school of fish, not a man out of place.

These were the light horse of Shon Klear, herdsmen from the westering lands of Seanchan, and the broad equatorial plains running down to the Aryth Ocean, born to horse and lance.

Their line officers had ordered row upon row of wooden tent-pegs hammered into the ground at regular intervals. The top of the pegs were affixed with a ring of iron. At the word of command, the riders took turns to spur their steeds, couching their lances – twelve-foot shafts of turned cornel-wood tipped with a wicked foot-long steel spike – to ride down the row of pegs. Leaning low over the neck of their mount, spear-point skimming the earth, they vied with each other to snag as many hoops as possible, – a feat not only of dexterity and precision, but of control and strength to keep the lance aimed true while uprooting the deeply-embedded wooden stakes at full gallop.

The skill of the riders was exceptional. Few amongst them failed to collect a half-dozen or more tent-pegs at a pass. Yet despite this being a popular feast-day sport amongst their people, the contest was conducted in stony silence, instead of with the customary boasting and raillery, nary a smile to be seen, but faces drawn grim with deadly purpose. For this was no mere celebration of horsemanship, but a last act of preparation before martial skill was put to its final test. War with the iron horsemen of Malkier and the keen spears of the Taardad Aiel.

* * *

On an overlooking knoll, a carved chair of _s'redit_ ivory was placed, and upon it, sleek and corvine as any raven in his garb of ebony sat the Emperor, the yard-long obsidian blade of the Star Iron unsheathed upon his lap. He sat ramrod-straight in his seat, except for his head being slightly bowed forward, as though lost in thought, or perhaps prayer, and if breath or life filled his body, the immobility of his carriage gave it the lie.

His small, still figure should have been incongruous, even risible – a boyish pretension set against the ageless solitude that diminished and set at naught his soldiers. Instead, he surmounted all of it – the Fisher King at the centre of a cleared _sha'rah_ board.

Behind, steel skies framed him like the spreading wings of the Raven Empire, their shadow running on before to plunge the whole Earth into gloom. As if the whole earth held breath and waited for the man upon the throne to break his silence. Waited for him to stay his hand – or let it fall in anger.

To the left and right of his throne, six Ogier Gardeners stood in readiness. In recognition of the _alantin_ 's service, standing against Demandred, Mordred had appointed these half-dozen as an honour guard, an elite within an elite.

He had gone further, reinstating a long-dead tradition dating back to the days of Lews Therin himself. In public, the Tamyrlin Seat would be escorted by lictors – twelve men who each carried an axe and a bundle of wooden rods lashed together with cords, whose main purpose was to clear the way before him.

But there was another, darker side to their duties. The lictors' burden was representative of their ability to dispense summary punishment according to the whim of their master. A word from the lictor's master, and any man or woman – _da'covale_ , free, or even Blood – could be seized upon the spot and beaten bloody with the staves, or even executed out of hand with the headsman's axe they carried.

The symbolism was not lost upon the subjects who came before him. They faltered and grew pale under the awful regard of the _alantin_ paladins, whose faces were cast emotionless as graven idols carved from wood.

The lictors were a visible reminder that the Emperor's very word was law. That an Emperor could choose to set himself _above_ the law and institutions that served as his instrument to reward or to punish.

The distinction between those two things was subtle, but it was there. Those who had come before him had ruled according to the law – or at least had attempted to appear as if they were doing so. But Mordred Paendrag was resolved to know no bond but the exercise of his own will.

These light lancers were but a tithe of the strength Mordred Paendrag had gathered for his purpose. In its heyday, the Raven Empire could field perhaps three quarters of a million men in arms. Tens of thousands of _damane._ However, in the wake of the Reclamation, forces depleted by the civil war, or tied up garrisoning seditious regions and overseeing the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of displaced refugees, he could currently only muster at most two hundred thousand men – and the logistical support necessary to keep such an army in the field for any length of time. An army of comparable size, comprised of blacksmiths, farriers, engineers, bakers and cooks.

Two hundred thousand men. Before the Aiel War, before _Tarmon Gai'don_ , it would have been an unimaginable force. Today, it was a sizeable army, but not unheard of. The Aiel clans combined could match that in raw numbers, as could some of the stronger Westland nations. But his two hundred thousand men were trained to a bent of physical perfection in arms, battle-seasoned and unshakeably disciplined to a degree unknown in even the elite units in the Westland armies.

Their strength was complemented by the might of two thousand _damane_ , superbly augmented not just with cavalry but with two things no other power possessed. Legions of beasts trained for war – and the alien winged _raken_ and _to'raken,_ creatures of nightmare hailing from other, stranger Mirrors of the Wheel accessed by the Portal Stones.

Compared to the orchestrated brilliance of the Ever-Victorious Army commanded by a great captain, the army of a Westland nation was two-dimensional, sluggish and soft. Even the Aiel – a people born to war – could not stand against the Seanchan. Superb light infantry they might be, dauntless, fleet of foot and tough as you could wish, but they had no cavalry or heavy infantry. And though the Aiel had Wise Ones who could channel, they had proved to be no match for _damane,_ who existed for one purpose, and one purpose only. As living weapons. The Ever-Victorious Army had crushed the Shaido at every turn, annihilating whole septs at a time.

Then there was the pyrotechnic work of the Illuminators, and their Dragons. Only a few Westland nations – principally Andor – had access to the technology, though that was slowly changing. Seanchan innovation had produced personal black-powder weapons – muskets and most recently, pistols. There was a regiment of musketeers currently serving with the Winged Hammer. The long-barrelled muskets weren't terribly accurate, but they had excellent range and stopping-power. Not to mention they were _terrifying_ – particularly to cavalry.

It might only be two hundred thousand men at his back. But with an army like his, Mordred could go toe-to-toe with _anyone_. And given time, with Seanchan pacified, and the resources of an entire continent at his disposal, he would have the numbers not just to win battles against one foe at a time, but to assert his dominion across the globe.

Mordred glanced at the Ogier who occupied the place of honour at his liege's right hand. Arganthir, son of Caranthir – the Gardener who, dying of his wounds, had clutched at the heel of the Forsaken, Demandred, buying Mordred the time to take his life. The memory gave the Emperor pause.

It should have been a source of pride – unaided or no – that Mordred had withstood the _Atha'an Shadar_ Blademaster, and that for a time he had stood alone and unyielding. Yet he felt nothing. Not even relief at having survived the deadly encounter.

He gazed down at the dark steel he had taken from Demandred. _Anir Shiatir_ appeared to look back into him, the slick matt-black metal half-reflecting his image back at him as a wraith, face masked in a caul of shadow.

He had intended to bear the Star Iron into battle himself, but now he knew he would not. He had practiced with the long blade, alone, shutting the doors to his training-hall to dance the forms in solitude. He had told himself the long blade did not suit him, a shorter man who preferred the manoeuvrability afforded him by a shorter sword. But Mordred was a warrior, and a good one, and knew the graveyards were filled with warriors that lied to themselves. He owned the truth.

The fact was he could not bear the feel of the ancient weapon in his hands, still less the clammy touch of the flat of the blade against his skin. The weapon was always icy to the touch.

It might be the equal of Justice, the great sword of Artur Paendrag Tanreall himself, in craftsmanship, but the Star Iron was an unlovely thing, though no dark rite of blood sacrifice had been used in its forging. The Power-wrought blade was tainted just the same, by the cruel soul of the man who had carried it for three thousand years. Its soul stained by the hundreds of lives unrighteously taken at its point over the years, sharp and cold as the North Star.

The black steel was a mirror, of sorts, black as a Myrddraal's cloak, black as a Gateway. It _was_ a Gateway, too, in a way – to a place as dark in counsel as Aridhol. The Star Iron clove to the truth, but it was a truth benighted of hope, showing a man his darkest reality.

As he had worked the sword, a voice had come to him. The song he had heard his father sing just once, when news of his grandfather Abell Cauthon's passing had reached the Seanchan lands.

News of the death of a farrier and horse-trader in the Two Rivers that had struck Uthair with wonderment. News from another world he had never known that confounded the heart of his sire, the Prince of Ravens, the Son of Battles. It was not a grief Maitrim could have shared with his son, were he willing or no, nor even with Tuon.

The song was not the rollicking ballads of the fighting men of the Band, nor the bawdy tales of women and wagering that were his father's staple currency in better times. Not that night – alone, bereft, drunken. It was an older music. Wilder. Truer. The _sean-nós_ songs of Manetheren, the Mountain Home – slow, elegiac and grand, in the High Tongue.

 _Weep for Manetheren. Weep for what is lost forever._

Maitrim Cauthon was terrible in his solitary grief, and Uthair had hidden from his father's face. The young warrior had not known this battlefield. _Not then, and now, perhaps never in life,_ came the remorseless truth of the Star Iron _._ As ever, cutting deep, cutting true.

Uthair had studied the Old Tongue, as befitted princes of the Blood, but the ancient dialect his father sang in, and the ornamented singing style made his words hard to decipher. Yet he had understood enough, perhaps, or as much as he could bear. A verse came to him:

" _Now the grave is waiting for us all,_

 _The whole wide world must heed its call –_

 _And it steals the mother from her brood,_

 _As it stole away my boyhood."_

The Old Tongue was nuanced, couched in double-meanings and the words were more than simple linear narratives, deeper than churlish metaphor. This was more than a simple tale of the loss of a loved one.

With a cry of pain, Mordred had cast the Star Iron from him then, as if it was a blacklance that had envenomed his hand.

He saw that there was no going back. He was sealed to the Dark by bonds that had settled invisibly on him with the gossamer weight of a thousand cobwebs – each one by itself almost negligible. But collectively, they bound him in fetters of steel. He was trammelled to a dark path he had chosen in his hubris, in overweening pride. Heart inflamed by wrath, when he had passed sentence upon both parents, he had still been seeking acceptance, love, vindication for his perceived injuries. An acknowledgement of his solitary suffering.

Even then, part of him had trembled, seeking to step back from the brink, but his father's attempts at conciliation had only angered Mordred further. He _would_ have his say, impose his will!

Some part of him thought he could always relent at some later date, show clemency once his anger had run its course. But he now saw that past a point, the imperative of his acts had carried him onwards, to a place beyond forgiveness. He had been enthralled, he saw that now. The Star Iron even allowed him that truth, now it was too late for turning back.

Once a Darkfriend, always a Darkfriend.

And finally, Mordred saw he had even stolen from himself. The things he had truly desired remained forever out of reach. What he had bartered for were not those things, only the means of obtaining them, as he had judged it at the time in his naivety. Or the means of avenging the loss of them.

The Lord of Lies was a jealous master. He might offer a man the world for his soul, as he had done with Mordred, and mayhap would honour the letter of the bargain – if it suited his will. Yet, as Mordred was beginning to understand, the Great Lord delighted in denying his subjects the means of enjoying that which they had so dearly bought. It was the old saw: _Act in haste, repent at leisure._ The Lord of the Grave had cheated him of his past.

With a wrench of despair, he thought of Tylee. What would the old woman have thought of her pupil now? It was as if all the memories that had formerly brought balm to his angry spirit were dreams of another life he might have spent in honour. The life of another, better man that he might have been if he had shown integrity as well as deep-cunning and strength of will.

Those reveries tormented him now as waking dreams, falsely offering solace before goading his spirit with barbs of fire. _Darkfriend. Traitor. Betrayer of kin._

And what was he now, if even his past was lost to him? _A shadow on the steel. A faceless man._

But there was still ambition to enervate him. Even if the Great Lord had lied about his destiny, as Mordred feared, he would wrest dominion himself from an unwilling world. And there was still pride to stiffen his spine. _Pride is the coin without which a man's purse is truly empty._

* * *

With a paroxysm of barely-concealed irritation at having his reverie disturbed, Mordred became aware of a commotion. A man seeking an audience with the Emperor, voice raised in anger as he found his way barred by two axe-wielding Ogier Lictors. He was clearly agitated, paying the weapons of the Gardeners no mind as he confronted them. A big man, clearly a fighter, but childlike against the massive bulk of the _alantin_. Yet they eyed up the intruder with the wary attention of a baited bear confronted by a mastiff.

With a start, Mordred recognised the man. It was the Warder, Darryl Harlan. It was respect for the skills of a Blademaster that informed the Ogier's cautious demeanour. Yet the man who stood before him now was almost unrecognisable.

Harlan, usually clean-shaven and bright of eye, wore the sunken cheeks and hollow eyes of the sleepless, and what Mordred judged to be three days of stubble on his chin. His placid, almost lazy carriage had been replaced by a twitchy, nervous energy, and it was this as much as his fighting prowess that had unsettled the Lictors. Not just a fighting mastiff, but a rabid one, too.

 _It was a pity_ , Mordred reflected inwardly. The _da'covale_ was a talented warrior – one of the best he had ever known – and that, together with his constant nature and simplistic loyalty – to his Aes Sedai, to her _sul'dam,_ and ultimately to him as his liege had made Harlan an invaluable and trustworthy asset.

Understanding came to Mordred, with a sliver of compassion that pricked his numbed heart. His Aes Sedai – the Saldean with the hooked nose and challenging eyes – had died during Demandred's assault upon the Tarasin Palace.

The Warder-bond meant that Harlan had felt both the anguish of the woman's stilling and then her death in quick succession. Warders who lost their Aes Sedai usually died from it shortly thereafter – in fact, it was fair to say that 'usually' meant 'almost universally'. They would customarily cast their lives away in revenge missions that even a Warder could not survive. Some would even die outright from the grief itself. That Harlan still lived was a testament to the man's powers of endurance, and also to his strong sense of a duty still owed to his Emperor.

Mordred frowned. He rarely forgot a face, but names often escaped him, particularly those of property. It irked him that he could not remember the Saldean woman's name. Another failing.

The Emperor tamped the ember of compassion underfoot. Harlan was a broken sword. But maybe he might still be of some use.

With an irritated gesture, Mordred motioned the Ogier to stand aside and let him approach. The Gardeners did as he bade, but grudgingly, their gauntleted hands ready upon the hafts of the headsman's axes they bore. The intent was plain. They would suffer the Warder to approach their lord, but any false move would see him cut down in a heartbeat.

Darryl Harlan did not so much as bow to his royal master, fixing him instead with a tormented gaze in which the remnants of duty was kindling for the immolating anguish that was consuming his spirit. He raised his voice in words that were both plea and demand.

"My Emperor, I have given faithful service while I yet could. Now I beg of you, release me from my charge, ere I dishonour it at the last. The torment that drives me will brook neither duty nor care or even honour. Let me go as I will, and die, as I must."

Mordred met his bondsman's eye with a will that was for a time the equal of the masterless fire that consumed the house of the Warder's spirit.

"Go then, as you must" he uttered finally, "but not without thanks for service well-rendered and duty well-met! I have one final service that needs fulfilling, and I would ask you now, as a freed man and not my thrall, to attempt it for the love you bore me, and so that your dying is not in vain and mayhap even give you peace."

Harlan's face was written with inward strife, as he finally nodded in assent. "If I can do it, I will, Lord – if I remain my own master long enough to make attempt."

Mordred nodded in approbation. "Then step forward, Darryl Harlan. I have two gifts for you." He himself arose from his seat, offering the Warder the naked steel of the unsheathed Star Iron.

The Warder took the proffered blade, looking down into it in dark reverence.

"It is a tool of ill wyrd." He stated the words dispassionately. "In better times, I would want no part of it. But it will cleave true, I wager. For good or for ill. I will bear it. And what of your other gift?"

From a pouch, with a leather-gloved hand, Mordred withdrew a small object, holding it gingerly. "This is a Bloodknife ring. Do you know its purpose?" he asked of the Warder.

Darryl Harlan simply nodded for answer, looking down at what appeared to be a ring of carved black stone, cunningly fashioned in the shape of a vine with thorns.

"As soon as you don the ring" Mordred warned him, "and the thorn breaks your skin, your blood activates the _ter'angreal._ Whilst wearing the ring, your speed and strength will be augmented beyond that of mortal man. Not only that, but the ring makes you difficult to see and track, even to the most vigilant observer.

But these abilities come at a steep price – though I venture that will concern you not at all. The weave that the device activates – Night's Shade – also leeches away your life, so you will die soon thereafter, within a matter of weeks. Maybe days."

Darryl Harlan had but one question. "What is it that you wish me to attempt."

"I want you to kill one man. A very dangerous man, exceptionally well-guarded and ever-watchful. He is the King of Malkier, Lan Mandragoran." Mordred noted the widening of the Warder's eyes in recognition at the name. "I will understand if you do not wish to raise your sword against a fellow _Gaidin._ But I need your answer now."

"Why?"

"It is not the prerogative of kings" Mordred drawled, suddenly impatient "to answer questions. Only to ask them, and to give commands. I need him dead. Will you do it, or no?"

"Give me the accursed ring." Darryl Harlan gnarred, reaching out a hand towards the Emperor. "You have your answer."


	33. Chapter 33: Hand Of The Dark

**Chapter 33: Hand of the Dark**

The wind parted the translucent drapes partitioning the Amyrlin's study from the balcony, an intrusive visitor bringing with it the clammy chill of the River Erinin far below as it beleaguered the Shining Walls. The wind brought with it a suggestive miasma, a mildewed undertone. Moghedien shivered at its touch, drawing in upon herself, like hands cupping to protect the firstflames struck from flint and steel. The hope that fire could be kindled, but not the expectation.

She stared listlessly down at her bowl of porridge, still steaming in the numbing cold, but already lukewarm. Pried free a lump of the congealing, soggy mass, and forced it down. It was as unappealing as it looked, worse now it had cooled for the generous dollop of honey she had stirred in in the forlorn hope of making the bland dish taste of something. Food was food, though. You never passed up a chance to eat, or to sleep. Especially when surrounded by your enemies. Living was an imperative.

It was cold, and it was silent, an ominous pall of grey draped over the world. Tar Valon had once bustled, enervated and vigorous, a place of security and prosperity behind walls that no army had ever breached, and its clamour had carried even here, hundreds of feet above its streets where the White Tower clove the clouds, its hubbub benignly tolerated by the Aes Sedai.

What had happened to all those people? Moghedien could only speculate. Perhaps a once free and fair folk laboured as drudges, grim and surly under the lash. Or maybe they had long ago filled Trolloc cookpots. A Darkhound pack took a great deal of feeding, too, and they only took living human meat.

Life under the Dark Power was apt to be unpredictable, lives cut short on a whim. Perhaps Semirhage or Mesaana had merely been irritated by the noise distracting them from their work. Looked down with disgust from on high and determined that all these people were a distraction, or simply an inefficient use of resources. It could have even been a statement of ownership: _A new broom sweeps clean_. Upon such concerns, the fates of whole populations were determined.

Across the table, her back to the draught, sat Semirhage. If the Lady of Pain felt the cold, she evinced no sign of discomfort. Having failed to draw Moghedien out from behind her watchful, hollow-eyed silence, she hunched over a bunch of scrolls and papers, methodically working her way through the stack with brusque efficiency, quill slashing acerbic commentary in the margins of official documents, striking through errors, her generous mouth compressed to a thin, taut line as she worked, her brow furrowed in concentration.

It was clear the clerical work was little to Semirhage's liking, but she gave the matter her full attention nevertheless, her half-eaten porridge bowl pushed aside as she bent to her task. _It seemed that being_ Nae'blis _did not free you from the humdrum demands of paperwork_ , Moghedien reflected, her torpor robbing the thought of any trace of humour it might have had.

But then, only a fool shirked oversight and delegated responsibilities to her underlings, no matter how competent they happened to be. _Especially_ if they were competent. The pen had brought low as many men as the sword and the One Power together. Moghedien wondered exactly how many deaths had been authored by Mesaana's neat hand alone.

A curious thing, this detachment Moghedien felt. Like standing outside her body, observing her elevated heartrate, her fidgeting hands – all the symptoms of the anxiety as her fraught, restless mind worked overtime to spot precursors of imminent danger. Finding them in Semirhage's angry eyes, angular body language. Finding threat in every passing shadow. Not an idle fancy, she knew well. How horribly apposite, the name these primitives had come up with for the Myrddraal. _Lurks_.

Shaidar Haran would always be with her. Her memories – the flashbacks that were more real in every meaningful way than anything in the present, waking world – had abated in frequency and duration over the intervening years. But when they came, they were unmanning. Overwhelming.

You did not have to travel to Shayol Ghul, a place where space and time itself was pliant, plastic, to find proof that reality, or at least consciousness was infinitely malleable. Trauma would do all that, and more.

Moghedien was awake now, _present,_ and sober, the narcotics Semirhage had plied her with out of her system as far as she could tell. And yet, in stuttering, intermittent epileptic flickers a dozen heartbeats apart, rebus-like images of Shaidar Haran's ghastly eyeless face spliced into her here and now, making her flinch, recoil in terror.

Flashbacks. Moving pictures, like Semirhage's films, but through her eyes. But no courtly-paced, saccharine Paaran Disen love-story in grainy black-and-white, these recollections of hers, no! They were second-long reels of half-glimpsed atrocities, both real and imagined, steeped in the imperatives of that terror and anguish, spooling past her eyes at a breakneck, ungoverned pace. Jolts of pure sensation that could not be denied. Pain she felt as intensely as she had at the time it had happened, both physically and mentally. As Semirhage herself could have told her, pain is all in the mind. That truth cut both ways.

The detachment, the numbness she now experienced was a coping mechanism, something as fundamental to her survival as the _ko'di_ , but innate, unlearned. Instinctive. Once, she had feared that she would never escape what Shaidar Haran had done to her. That eventually she would become completely disconnected from the waking world, trapped forever in the reality of her past torments. But instead, gradually, she had clawed her way out of the nightmare, through tenacity and blind instinct.

She hadn't 'healed', not really. She was still sick, but she had learned to live as a convalescent. If her mind was a house, she had reclaimed her territory, a frightened child braving the dark with a candle to bring light – if not cheer – into the dark, room by room; leaving Shaidar Haran scrabbling behind the walls with long and splintered fingernails, shambling through the attic-space above, the roof-beams groaning under his oppressive weight, slinking with the rats under the skirting-boards. The erratic patter of their scurrying feet the tremulous threnody of her alarmed heartbeat.

What Semirhage had done the previous night had breached the carefully-constructed defences that had served her – had saved her – and let the Hand of the Dark back into her shattered mind. Semirhage's long, acquisitive fingers had idly snuffed out the candles of hope and reason Moghedien had tended that prevented the weight of shadow aggregating through which Shaidar Haran would step with the assurance of the Lord of the Grave that reality itself would bend and buckle and crumble to his purpose, would close upon her like a fist.

"'The Wheel of Time turns around Tar Valon, and Tar Valon turns around the Tower'"

Moghedien started, as Semirhage abruptly broke the long silence, eyes flickering up unwittingly from the safety of her porridge bowl, where they were trapped by the Lady of Pain's black-within-black gaze. The _saa_ coursed dangerously across the onyx span of her iris. Moghedien found she could not meet her tormentor's gaze, nor withdraw from it. The air seemed to compress her chest, crushing her ribcage against the trapped-bird fluttering of her racing heart. Not the Power. Just the raw stuff of fear. Semirhage's mouth curved in a generous smile.

"A foolish quote" the dark woman continued, after indulging a heartbeat's pleasure drinking in Moghedien's misery, "the self-aggrandizement of some rich Tar Valon wool-merchant, perhaps, with enough wit to feel the nexus of power, and enough hubris to seek to vicariously claim a portion of the glory of it for himself. And yet, it pleases me. It is why I have chosen this place for my own. Because of what Tar Valon represents." A moué and a self-deprecating hand gesture hinted at irony, but those lustrous eyes never wavered in their monomaniacal intensity. "I could never allow Mesaana, or Demandred to have this place" she confided. "Nor even that broken doll _Moridin_." Real bite nakedly displayed in the last sneer, unvarnished by the polish of Semirhage's hauteur.

It was telling. Whatever Moridin's current status, Semirhage clearly still evinced a measure of fear for the Betrayer of Hope that she did not have for the other remaining Forsaken. However 'broken' Moridin might be, he was still dangerous. And if in truth he was insane – well, the insane have their own agenda. Perhaps Moridin no longer cared to be _Nae'blis_. For the trappings of power that the other Forsaken sought and fought over. But Moghedien did not doubt he would strike with less compunction than a roused blacklance if he saw his way clear to obtaining what he desired, or if he perceived those goals threatened.

* * *

"YOU OVERREACH. YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN YOUR PLACE BEFORE ME."

That voice. Moghedien was out of her chair, whirling around in alarm, before she was even aware of it. Dimly, she was aware of Semirhage hurriedly prostrating herself, pressing her forehead against the stones.

Moghedien rushed to follow suit, not knowing which of the two of them Shaidar Haran was addressing. Not caring. It didn't matter. Obedience – total, complete subjugation – was always demanded by the Hand of the Dark.

She felt warm wetness between her thighs, spreading uncomfortably and was dimly aware she had wet herself in the extremity of her fear. That, too, didn't matter. There was this to be said, she thought hysterically, that with her face pressed gratefully to the cold limestone, she did not have to bear the weight of His eyeless gaze, or look upon the liverish, waxy obscenity of His countenance.

She felt a weight settle upon the back of her neck, grinding her face against the flags. Shaidar Haran's foot. From the grunt escaping Semirhage, she was receiving the same mistreatment. Which was physically impossible, of course. If His single foot was big enough to encompass the pair of them, then He couldn't possibly fit within the dimensions of this room. But to the Great Lord, and to a certain extent, His avatar, reality was subjective. He willed a thing to be so, and it was.

BEING _NAE'BLIS_ MEANS YOU ARE FIRST AMONG MY CHATTEL, SEMIRHAGE. THE HUMANS AND THE TROLLOCS AND THE MYRDDRAAL AND MY OTHER SERVANTS.

TO ME, SHAIDAR HARAN, YOU ARE CHIEF AMONG CARRION. FIRST AMONG MAGGOTS.

 _I_ AM A CONSECRATED VESSEL OF THE GREAT LORD HIMSELF. IN A LIMITED WAY, I _AM_ HIM. I HAD THOUGHT I HAD MADE OUR RELATIVE POSITIONS CLEAR. I THOUGHT I HAD CURED YOU OF YOUR ERRANT WAYS.

I TOLD YOU TO MEET MOGHEDIEN, MAKE SURE SHE DID NOT ESCAPE, AND DELIVER HER TO ME FOR INSTRUCTION. I DID _NOT_ INSTRUCT YOU TO PLAY WITH HER. HAD YOU BROKEN HER IN SUCH A WAY THAT SHE COULD NO LONGER SERVE HER PURPOSE, YOU WOULD HAVE DESTROYED THE ONLY INSTRUMENT CAPABLE OF CARRYING OUT MY GREAT PURPOSE. THE MIRROR OF THE WHEEL SHE CAME FROM WOULD HAVE BEEN FOREVER DENIED ME.

YOU WILL BE PUNISHED IN DUE COURSE. THAT IS IMMATERIAL. WHAT SOLELY MATTERS IS THAT MY WILL IS MET IN ALL THINGS.

Moghedien felt the gravity of his gaze descend upon her.

AS FOR YOU, MOGHEDIEN, I AM BETTER PLEASED. YOU HAVE SHOWN BOTH ABILITY AND INITIATIVE. IT SEEMS YOU TAKE INSTRUCTION.

The voice like an avalanche, bearing down upon her, unstoppable. Inexorable.

LOOK UPON ME, MOGHEDIEN.

As if her head was compelled by pincers of steel, she looked up into that leprous face. _The look of the Eyeless is fear._ Moghedien had stared into the faces of a thousand Myrddraal and compelled them to obey, had met the eyes of the man who called himself Death and not flinched.

Shaidar Haran was _contagion._ Pestilence walking. He had but to will it and her ovaries and womb would rot in her belly, beyond any of the arts of Healing.

It was a humanoid face, somehow without anything of the stamp of humanity about it. That mantrap mouth, gums skinned back to strong, yellowing incisors that lusted to bite and bite. That rotten carrion breath, like a plague pit. Those abyssal empty sockets that drained the light from the room, voids that could never be filled if they quenched a million million suns. There was nothing sane in that face. Just a leering, knowing and unholy joy.

Behind him gathered a darkness beyond black, a void beyond the hope and memory of light. It pulsed and writhed and crawled. Somehow Moghedien knew that Shaidar Haran was stronger, the Great Lord more _present_ here than she had believed possible. That dwimmerlight, so powerful that the corporeal form of Shaidar Haran itself was barely more than a projection. In a world without the Light, the Lord of the Grave was omnipresent. Yet the talon of Saidar Haran's hand was appallingly strong as it closed about her throat.

MY LITTLE DOLL, Shaidar Haran crooned, those dreadful eyes peeling back her consciousness, layer by layer, probing for the intelligence he wanted. Appallingly, she felt herself becoming aroused, becoming wet at the depredation of His touch. Not because _she_ herself wanted it, but because Shaidar Haran wanted her to feel that way. Standing this close to him, the force of His will was inexorable.

Of course, the monster was often pleased to have her endure the natural revulsion and horror His presence inspired. The point was, Shaidar Haran did not want his subjects to have any degree of autonomy. He desired only unbridled power, absolute dominion. Unceasing. Eternal. Moghedien knew this, and it did nothing whatsoever to mitigate the abnegation, the abyssal shame and guilt she felt in every fibre of her being.

NO, SEMIRHAGE HAS NOT RUINED YOU BEYOND USE, the creature concluded, finally. A wave of gratitude, relief swept through Moghedien. It would be a terrible thing to fail Shaidar Haran, even through no fault of her own, and she sagged as Shaidar Haran released her from his grip.

SADLY, THERE IS NO TIME FOR SPORT. YOUR GOOD WORK HAS EARNED YOU, AT THE LEAST, A CONTINUANCE FOR THE TIME BEING. YOU HAVE THE DARKBOX?

Moghedien rushed to assure the Hand of the Dark that she did, stammering and tripping over her words in a gabble of protestations of fidelity. He silenced her with a chopping motion of his hand.

I HAVE ANOTHER SUCH. AS YOU KNOW, THE DARKBOX FASHIONS A LINK BETWEEN ME – THE GREAT LORD – AND THE USER. TO A LIMITED EXTENT, IT ALSO ALLOWS A LINK TO BE FASHIONED BETWEEN THE COPIES OF ME IN THE MIRRORS OF THE WHEEL.

IN THE MIRRORS WHERE I AM FREE, IT IS OF COURSE, REDUNDANT. BUT IT DOES ALLOW ME TO SENSE THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF MY ALTER IN HIS PRISON IN YOUR MIRROR. BECAUSE THE GREAT LORD HAS CORPREAL EXISTENCE ONLY IN CORPOREAL MATTER FROM THAT REALITY, I CAN DO NO MORE THAN SENSE HIM. NOTHING MORE.

HOWEVER, IF YOU TAKE A DARKBOX FROM YOUR WORLD, AND A DARKBOX FROM MINE, AND COMBINE THEM IN YOUR WORLD, THEY CREATE A DARKSEED. A BORE, BUT FROM HERE TO THERE. FROM THERE I CAN POUR MY INFLUENCE INTO THAT WORLD, JUST HE DID BEFORE RAND AL'THOR SEALED HIM UP.

I CANNOT RELEASE MY ALTER FROM HIS PRISON. NOR DO I CARE TO. FAILURE SHOULD ALWAYS BE PUNISHED. EVEN FROM ME. WEAKNESS SHOULD BE PERSECUTED. AL'THOR DID HIS WORK WELL, BUT ULTIMATELY MY ALTER FAILED.

WHETHER HE STILL _IS_ ME AT THIS POINT – AS MY OTHER COPIES IN THE SHEAF ARE – IS A MATTER OF PHILOLOGICAL DEBATE. MY OTHER COPIES ARE SYNCHRONOUS AND HE IS NOT. IT MATTERS NOT. WHAT DOES IS THAT I REACH OUT TO THE ONLY WORLD THE CREATOR OWNS AND WREST IT FROM HIS INTENDED PLAN. ONLY THEN AM I FREE TO TEAR THE WHOLE EDIFICE DOWN, OR SIMPLY OWN AND SHAPE IT AS I SEE FIT.

YOU MIGHT ASK, WHY DO I NOT GO MYSELF, RATHER THAN SENDING A HUMAN EMISSARY? THE ANSWER IS THAT I INVESTED MYSELF INTO THE ESSENCE OF THE WORLDS I OWN. THEY ARE IN ME, AND I IN THEM. IT IS THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE COPIES OF ME. AND SO I AM CONSTRAINED BY THE PHYSICAL LAWS OF THE MULTIVERSE.

I CANNOT PASS THE PORTALS, NEITHER AS MYSELF OR AS SHAIDAR HARAN. I DESTROYED ONE THOUSAND CONSECRATED VESSELS IN THE ATTEMPT WITHOUT SUCCESS. THE ALTER IN YOUR WORLD IS NOT DEAD, ONLY CAGED. THEREFORE, I CANNOT PASS.

THE OTHER PART OF THE TASK REQUIRED TO COMPLETE THE WORK IS TO KILL THE DRAGON. _KILL THE DRAGON, BREAK THE WHEEL._ SO IT IS WRITTEN.

RAND AL'THOR HAS PROVEN DANGEROUS AND RESOURCEFUL. I BELIEVE HIM TO BE AN AVATAR OF THE CREATOR, WITHOUT A CONSCIOUS KNOWLEDGE OF THE FACT. UNLIKE ME, THE ADVERSARY CLAIMS TO GIVE HIS CREATIONS AUTONOMY. I BELIEVE HE LIES, BUT IT MAY BE POSSIBLE HE IS TELLING THE TRUTH.

TO THAT END, I SENT DEMANDRED. MY GREATEST GENERAL. MY GREATEST WARRIOR. ONCE HE PASSED THE PORTAL, I LOST CONTACT WITH HIM. I DO NOT KNOW IF DEMANDRED SUCCEEDED, OR FAILED, OR SIMPLY WALKED AWAY FROM HIS TASK TO SET HIMSELF UP AS A KING IN THAT WORLD OUTSIDE OF MY CLAIM UPON HIM.

I KNOW HE HAS LITTLE LOVE FOR ME. BUT I KNOW DEMANDRED HATES THE DRAGON MORE THAN HE LOVES ANY LIVING THING. MORE, IN FACT, THAN HE LOVES HIMSELF. I BELIEVE HE FAILED. SO WITH YOU, I WILL SEND ANOTHER ASSASSIN. THE FORSAKEN, MORIDIN. HE HAS AN UNPARALLELED TALENT FOR DEATH.

Shockingly, Shaidar Haran laughed, gutturally at that. HE HATES ME, TOO. I AM THE EMBODIMENT OF HIS DESPAIR AND NIHILISM. HE HATES ME AS HE HATES HIS PAIN, AND AS HE HATES HIMSELF. APART FROM THAT, I AM THE ONLY THING – APART FROM HIMSELF – IN ALL THE MIRRORS OF THE WHEEL HE CANNOT KILL!

IMAGINE HIS FURY WHEN I REFUSED TO LET HIM DIE IN THIS WORLD, AFTER HE SLEW THIS WORLD'S AL'THOR! I STILL HAD USE FOR HIM. THE TASK HE WAS APPOINTED FOR. I DID NOT BREAK MY WORD. I DO NOT HAVE FINAL VICTORY, AND AL'THOR YET LIVES IN YOUR MIRROR.

IN PIQUE, MORIDIN SLEW HIMSELF A HALF-HUNDRED TIMES. BUT I AM THE LORD OF THE GRAVE, AND I SPUN HIM BACK OUT AGAIN INTO NEW BODIES. WHEN HE TIRED OF THAT, HE SET TRAPS FOR MY PREDECESSORS, AND SUCCEEDED IN KILLING SEVERAL SHAIDAR HARAN BODIES. SOMETHING THAT SHOULD BE NIGH-IMPOSSIBLE. IN HIS DESPERATION AND INGENUITY, I SAW I HAD PICKED THE RIGHT TOOL.

AND HE HATES AL'THOR. IN KILLING THE DRAGON, HE IS KILLING HIS HUMANITY. HE YEARNS TO DO IT, OVER AND OVER. HE THINKS IT IS THE FINAL OBSCENITY WHICH WILL FREE HIM FROM HIS ANGUISH. AS YOU CAN IMAGINE, MORIDIN IS LESS THAN STABLE. LESS THAN SANE. VERY VOLATILE AND UNPREDICTABLE. BUT I THINK HE WILL LEAP AT THE CHANCE TO TAKE THE MISSION OF GOING TO YOUR MIRROR AND KILLING AL'THOR.

THERE, HE CAN DIE AND FIND THE OBLIVION HE CRAVES, AND FINALLY BE FREE FROM ME. BUT I AM SURE HE WILL WANT TO SEE AL'THOR DEAD FIRST. Shaidar Haran punctuated his statement with another grim laugh. IN THE END, ALL THINGS SERVE THE GREAT LORD.


	34. Chapter 34: A Man Called Death

**Chapter 34: A Man Called Death**

The crouching darkness around Shaidar Haran gathered, restless, and suddenly Moghedien became aware that something was coalescing from the blackness – solidifying and strengthening. The hackles on the back of her neck rose. That was _not_ how a Gateway was supposed to form. Yet a Gateway it was, its edges foggy and ethereal as smoke instead of the crisp regularity they should have been.

It was pitch-dark on the other side of the doorway, and her eyes focused, trying to pierce the shadows. A faint, musty smell emanated, the flat copper undertones of old spilled blood, the sharp ammonia of stale sweat. It was a lightless crypt, with a low vaulted ceiling, its recesses shading into night.

But the waiting darkness was not empty. She could feel the weight of a cold gaze rest upon her in malediction. Shaidar Haran felt it too. She felt rather than saw the Myrddraal tense in anticipation, and she backed slowly away from the aperture. If there was something in there that gave Shaidar Haran pause, she wanted no part of it.

Shaidar Haran did not utter a word. Bloodless lips skinned back from bared teeth in a death's head smile, he reached out into the darkness, grasping with corpse-white hands.

Leashes of black fire lashed out into the depths of the subterranean chamber, and Moghedien, who had known the caress of that liquid flame, cringed reflexively. She felt the tug, the resistance as the lash snared its prey, and it seemed that Semirhage had experienced the same, the two of them sharing an uneasy, knowing look.

The imperative of that dark fire was denied by the dungeon's denizen. He was either impervious to pain, or imbued with a strength of will that bordered on monomania, and Shaidar Haran staggered fractionally, finding unexpected resistance. But if anything, his sneer broadened, grew more vulpine as he exerted himself, muscles like steel cables hauling his unwilling subject forward.

Shaidar Haran might have intended to drag his prisoner forth on his bended knees, unmanned by pain, but the figure that darkened the threshold, reeling bruised, staggering and bleeding into the light, was unbent. If he was dazed by the glaring light after his midnight incarceration, he gave no sign.

He straightened, as if his backbone was cast from wrought iron, his face cast in a prideful sneer to match that of Shaidar Haran's, and locked gaze with the eyeless stare of the Hand of the Dark with a visible effort, the nervous tic in his cheek betraying his tightly-clenched teeth.

Moghedien moaned soundlessly, horrified. Surely they would _all_ be punished for this fool's defiance. Yet there he stood, a king in rags.

He was tall, and would have been comely, once, the breadth of his shoulders and hips defining the build of a powerful man – though dwarfed by the imposing figure of Shaidar Haran. But his sunken chest and emaciated limbs told a tale of malnutrition, his parchment skin clinging to his ribs, and the tatterdemalion rags of once-rich clothing hung loosely upon his spare frame. The furze of a thickly-matted beard clung to his lantern jaw, its unkempt wildness at odds with the remnants of his lank black hair, some of which appeared to have been torn out, leaving a tonsured patch. He reminded Moghedien of someone, but she could not place him.

He was bruised and battered, but Moghedien had seen worse. _Far_ worse. If this wretch had endured the Myrddraal's ministrations, he seemed little the worse for wear. Of course, appearances could be deceptive. There were many ways to break a man without leaving a mark. But she doubted it. This prisoner was still full of piss and vinegar.

The prisoner broke his stony silence with a laugh of genuine humour, rich and deep, a well-fed chuckle at odds with his gaunt appearance, and it was then Moghedien recognised him. _Moridin._ But his glacial blue eyes held only contempt and wrath, raking the two women with unconcealed scorn.

Moghedien met his gaze with anger and loathing. She could not _hate_ Shaidar Haran. As well raise her hand to the Great Lord Himself! Before the Hand of the Dark she could only cringe abjectly, and suffer what she must. Learn to obey in fear and dread for her immortal soul.

But she could hate the man who had given her to him as punishment. Moridin was powerful, but he was flesh and blood, just as she was. She could hate him, and wait, patiently, in the shadows. Biding her time to take her revenge.

It was Shaidar Haran that broke the silence. Ignoring the women, he addressed Moridin.

HOW ARE YOU ENJOYING YOUR SOLITUDE? I WOULD IMAGINE THAT EVEN A BUSY LITTLE MIND LIKE YOURS WEARIES OF IT AFTER A TIME.

Moridin's smile gleamed like the drawing of swords. "Oh, I am easily amused, Shaidar Haran. When the ennui gets too much for me, I just reminisce about happier times. About how it felt dispatching you, for instance. That perfect moment when my blade slipped home in your gullet." He made an obscene gesture at the Myrddraal. "The hand that took your life now masturbates at the memory of it."

Shaidar Haran did not move a muscle, but his smile was hungry rather than playful. A shark scenting blood. YET HERE I STAND. AND HERE YOU STAND.

"And here I stand. And here you stand." Moridin mirrored his words tonelessly. The truth of the Myrddraal's taunt had wiped the brittle smile from his face. But not the defiance. "What do you _want_ , Myrddraal?" the Forsaken snapped at his tormentor.

YOU WILL GO TO ANOTHER MIRROR OF THE WHEEL. THE SINGULAR MIRROR WHERE THE GREAT LORD WAS IMPRISONED BY THE DRAGON REBORN.

YOU WILL PROTECT MOGHEDIEN UNTIL HER QUEST IS OVER, AND THEN YOU WILL KILL THE DRAGON. AFTER THAT, YOU CAN DO AS YOU PLEASE. DIE, IF YOU WILL, IN A WORLD WHERE THE GREAT LORD DOES NOT REIGN AND BE FREE OF HIS CLAIM UPON YOU.

"All of that sounds wonderful. Kill the Dragon. Die forever." Moridin eyed the Myrddraal suspiciously. "What is Moghedien's ploy? Why must I nursemaid the chit? Surely after three thousand years of life, even _she_ must be old enough to be weaned from apron strings?"

THAT IS NONE OF YOUR CONCERN.

"Once I am in that world, away from you – away from _him_ – what's to stop me killing myself as soon as I get there, if I have a mind? Or ridding the Mirror of that snivelling wench?" Moridin asked slyly, his gesture indicating Moghedien. "After all, your master cozens, and lies. Why should I do anything for him from my own free will?"

BECAUSE MOGHEDIEN'S TASK WILL DRAW THE DRAGON TO YOU. AND YOU CANNOT GO TO YOUR OWN REST KNOWING RAND AL'THOR YET LIVES – IN THIS MIRROR OF THE WHEEL OR ANOTHER. YOU ARE THE ONLY MORIDIN LEFT IN THE PATTERN. HE IS THE ONLY DRAGON LEFT IN THE PATTERN. IT IS DESTINY.

TOGETHER, YOU ARE THE FISHER KING. BLINKERED. BLIND. BLEEDING. DARK AND LIGHT, HOBBLED TOGETHER. IT IS YOURS TO END THE TORMENT. YOURS TO BRING CLOSURE. YOURS TO BREAK THE WHEEL.

Moridin's suspicious gaze encompassed Moghedien as well as Shaidar Haran. "What makes you think _she_ will hold to her task?" Moridin's pallid features were etched in acid disdain. "She has always been a puling little coward. Useless. Spineless. I would be better off without her."

SHE, AT LEAST, KNOWS HER PLACE. Shaidar Haran responded evenly. SHE CAME HERE TO ME WITHOUT DURESS. OBEDIENCE IS INCULCATED IN HER VERY BEING. SHE KNOWS THAT DENYING THE GREAT LORD IS DENYING HERSELF.

SHE IS THE REMORA FISH CLEANING THE SHARK'S TEETH. AS _NAE'BLIS,_ SHE HAS THE POWER OF THE GREAT LORD AS HER SURETY. WITHOUT, IN A WORLD REMOVED FROM THE TOUCH OF THE LORD OF THE GRAVE, SHE IS MERELY PREY IN A WORLD FULL OF ENEMIES WITH LONG MEMORIES.

Shaidar Haran's awful regard was a mountainous weight, pressing down upon Moridin and Moghedien. There was contempt, seasoned with amusement in his voice. YOU TWO ARE THE TOOLS APPOINTED FOR THE TASK. AND YET YOU EACH HATE THE OTHER. HOW THEN TO KEEP YOU FROM KILLING ONE ANOTHER?

The question was evidently rhetorical, as he turned to Moghedien. DO YOU KNOW THE WEAVE THE SO-CALLED 'AES SEDAI' USE TO BOND THEIR WARDERS? USE IT NOW TO BIND MORIDIN TO YOU.

In her haste to comply, Moghedien fumbled at _saidar,_ failing like a novice to seize the Power at her first attempt. Moridin's chin rose in defiance. "I'm not having that witch rummaging around inside my head.." he expostulated, angry.

Moghedien plunged into the corrupting, waxy membrane of the Taint, breaking through it to the nova heat and roiling, inexorable current of _saidar_ underneath, as she seized the Source, clinging to tenuous control as if to a piece of driftwood caught up in a raging river torrent that scoured its river bed into a filthy, churning current. Chaos unbridled, the Power no longer holding the Wheel in balance, but instead stripping its gears and bearings, a millrace running out of control.

There was pain and fear in Moghedien's eyes, but there was also a wild, coital delight as she grabbed Moridin's hair in her fingers, pressing her palms against the sides of his head as she took him thrall.

And channelled.

Moridin's back arched, spasming, as the Power poured into him through her, a riot of impressions and sensations from Moridin spilling back through the connection into Moghedien as she wove. Spirit and Fire that seared, Water and Air that buffeted, Earth inexorable like an avalanche, forcing him to his knees in front of her. She felt his strength, his will as he resisted her, but what she was doing to him ran deeper than his attempt to fight it, was written in the marrow of his bones, in every straining sinew.

She felt his hatred for her, his fear, and she was laughing even as tears ran down her cheeks – enlivened, enervated as she took her vengeance. She could feel his body through hers. The ache of his bruises and contusions, the faultline of a broken thigh bone, badly-healed. She could taste the metallic copper of his blood in her mouth from where he'd bitten the inside of his cheek, warm and unpleasantly bland.

With the noose of _saidar_ tightening upon Moridin, a cornucopia of feelings enlivening her senses in a synaesthesia, she began to weave anew, forcefully, _saidar_ the awl of her purpose piercing the flesh of Moridin's spirit as she dragged threads of the Power through him, knitting the web of her purpose about him, binding him with hundreds, thousands of infinitesimally fine filaments. Dimly, she was aware of Moridin keening in anguish, of Shaidar Haran demanding her to stop, but the imperative of her task could not be denied…

A heavy blow. Shaidar Haran's open palm, striking her forcefully across the side of her head, a dizzying buffet, beating her to her knees. In the next instant, _saidar_ was gone, wrenched from her, the connection severed, its afterimage burning cobalt-blue in her eyes as she blinked. Moghedien could not even sense the Source. Shaidar Haran had shielded her.

His fingers seized her, settling like a vise upon her unprotected throat as he pulled her upright.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, MOGHEDIEN?

Choking, gasping, Moghedien struggled to speak. To make sense of what had just happened. _What did I just do?_ She couldn't recall. "Don't … know…" she forced out under the dread of the Hand of the Dark's gaze. "Don't … remember…"

Balked by the truth he saw in her eyes, the Myrddraal released her, before driving a marble-hard fist into her belly in evident frustration. She collapsed to her knees, foetal, balling around her pain as Shaidar Haran swung upon a dazed-looking Moridin.

BOND HER, the Hand of the Dark demanded of the male Forsaken.

This time it was Moghedien's turn to writhe, as Moridin's bond noosed her, a wire of braided _saidin_ leashing her ungently. Through the bond that she had caught him with, she could feel his feral satisfaction as he wove, the intent to subjugate and dominate.

A cold, displaced part of Moghedien's fractured psyche, analytic, observing dispassionately framed an awful thought. The male variant of the Warder-bond, the so-called ' _Asha'man_ bond' could be used to compel obedience.

Though this was also true of the Warder-bond, the Warder-bond could not enforce compliance of a male Warder who could channel – unless his ability was orders of magnitude weaker than hers. But the _Asha'man_ bond could force a woman to obedience, regardless of her ability to channel – irrespective of her strength in the Power.

There was another significant difference in the way the bonds worked, too. With the Warder-bond, the Aes Sedai needed to channel Spirit in order to assure the Warder's compliance. For the _Asha'man_ bond, only the will of the _Asha'man_ was required.

To Moghedien, the Warder-bond and its analogues symbolised the essential hypocrisy of the Lightfriends. _How they prate about freedom and justice, and yet they are all of them finding new and better ways to enslave one another. The Warder-bonds. The_ a'dam _and the Dominion Bands. All of them the creation of Lightfriends!_

Nobody could be trusted. Every institution – yes, even the bonds of family! – were fashioned to manipulate and control. Every smile was the gleam of a poacher's snare, a choking-wire concealed in the high grass to throttle the unwary.

With a grunt of satisfaction, Moridin pulled the weave tight, the intricate braid of _saidin_ falling into place … and falling apart, unravelling like a sheepshank knot pulled tight. Frustration in those cold blue eyes, Moridin began the weave again, only to see it fall apart once more as soon as he tried to tie it off.

After the third attempt, Moridin realised that the _Asha'man_ bond was not going to take upon Moghedien. His hand tightened painfully upon her hair. "What have you done to me, bitch?" he demanded. "Why is my weave falling apart?"

The suggestion of a cold smile played upon Moghedien's lips. "I don't know what I did, Moridin. Not exactly. It appears, however, that my leash upon you precludes you leashing me in turn. A useful amendation, to be sure, for one such as myself that will not suffer someone else's presence inside my head."

"Then I suggest you unleash me, and begin again, damn you – and this time, without any baroque improvisations of your own devising!" Moridin snapped.

Shaidar Haran loomed above the pair of them. BEGIN AGAIN, MOGHEDIEN, AND QUICKLY, the Myrddraal intoned balefully. UNLESS YOU WISH TO BRING MY ANGER DOWN UPON YOUR HEAD.

Moghedien could feel the quickness of the bond joining her to Moridin, binding him to her like an umbilical cord. Invisible, intangible. But still there. Experimentally, she flexed the connection, seeing where it bled into her, and seeing the synaptic network of connections where the bond infused Moridin. It reminded her of Compulsion, the way the neural network permeated every part of his being, his consciousness.

There was a point in the weave, a natural nexus where the web could normally be unravelled, and Moghedien found it. And frowned. Instead, the place was a tangle of fibres of the One Power. Seamless. It could not be unknotted. She could feel the tension in the weave. Feel it thrumming. Quickening under her touch. She couldn't release it. It was physically impossible. Nor could she cut it.

The only thing that could sever the bond she had created would be the death of one of them. And then they would both die horribly, Moghedien intuited. If an Aes Sedai died, the Warder would always die, driven mad by the severing of the connection. If a Warder died, the pain would incapacitate the Aes Sedai for a while, but it was generally survivable.

The severing of the leash Moghedien had woven would be infinitely more painful, and inescapable. The bond _was_ their lives. If the leash was cut, they would both die. If one of them died, the other would die.

Moghedien, her mouth dry, looked at the monster she had leashed. Whose life was now inextricably bound to hers. Irrevocably. _What had she done?_

Moridin met her eyes. Saw the truth in them and nodded grimly. She felt his resignation along the bond. Felt the coiled readiness of him, the rude strength his anger gave him and drew strength from it. "What is done is done" he said, starkly.


	35. Chapter 35: Blood Of The Dragon

**Chapter 35: Blood of the Dragon**

The caldera of the desert floor was never still. Sorilea closed her eyes, gratefully. To an Aiel, the Three-Fold Land was a living being, his sands shifting, groaning, murmuring. Quickened by the unblinking iris of the sun. Always thirsty. Always hungry.

The bleached whiteness of the sand, piling in drifts, in billows, encroaching, even into the streets of holy Rhuidean. Sorilea felt its caress on her cheek, dry particulate borne on a sighing, soughing breeze, and the old woman adjusted her _shoufa_ perfunctorily, covering her mouth to keep the dust out. The fine sand would find its way into the folds of her _cadin'sor_ , into her thinning hair under her cowling _kafiya_ anyway. The land was part of her, and she of it. Some day – some day soon – she would return to it. The dream would end.

The thin air of the Waste shaded into a translucent pallor at the asymptote of the horizon, a desiccated cyan. A storm long-passed banded the eastern margins the pink of an Andoran rose wine. The sun, hiding behind the skyline, cast a pillar of fire into the sky, testament to the bitter cold, to infinitesimal crystals of ice, perfect diamonds that would never be spilled upon the arid tracts of the Three-Fold Land.

And there was Rhuidean, the hidden heart of her people. Rising from the desert floor, white and pure and sharp as milled salt. There was joy in the morning. It was pristine. As if there had never been another day. When a woman tired of seeing the sun rise, she was tired of life.

Dust devils danced their gyre. In Aiel lore, they were the formless shades of those not strong enough to survive the trials of the Three-Fold Land. Restless, formless, without memory. They had not woken from the dream. Instead, they had lost everything, even the semblance of themselves.

This was not a kind place. It was a proving-ground. A trial within a trial. And it was a gift to the Aiel people. A shaping-stone to make them. A testing-ground to prove their worth. And a punishment for their sin.

Sorilea had walked the weirding-paths of the great _ter'angreal_ of Rhuidean, living both past and future lives. Nothing she had seen in either fork of the road had changed her purpose. Visiting the past had quickened her appreciation of the great sin her people had committed. And the revenant of the future, the threat hanging over the Aiel nation, did not daunt her either. It imbued her with purpose. The dream would end for her, soon, and she was not a wetlander to cling to life past purpose and youth, fearing Death. But in this, she was once again the young Maiden she had once been, her spears in her hand, the taste of her own blood in her mouth a bitter goad, impelling her to action. Death was nothing, but _toh_ was all.

Her gaze alighted on her companion. Shaiel was a young ridgecat of a girl, who fairly bristled with pride. Well. Pride was the province of youth. Pride could lend you strength, but it could lead you into folly. And foolishness got you killed. The young woman could not have been unaware of Sorilea's gaze, as she incrementally drew herself upright with a pointed sniff, the tilt of her chin suggesting diffidence, even disdain for the older woman.

 _In my day, they called it 'dumb insolence',_ Sorilea thought to herself, wryly. _Nothing that couldn't be cured with a little discipline._ As she yet lived, it was still her day!

Sorilea had little time for a girl's megrims, and yet, for once she was inclined to give Shaiel a little latitude. It was a hard thing for any woman to bend her neck to duty. Harder still to face that duty under the duress of prophecy.

It had been Foretold that the Aiel people would endure as long as the Tree of Life stood. The Aiel had endured what they must, in knowledge and in blood, as the Prophecy of Rhuidean had foretold:

 _He shall spill out the blood of those who call themselves Aiel as water on sand, and he shall break them as dried twigs, yet a remnant of a remnant shall he save, and they shall live._

Yet that price alone did not guarantee their survival as a people. Not now the _Car'a'carn_ had woken from the Dream.

But _Avendesora_ was dead. Burned from the Pattern by a madwoman. A thing almost beyond belief. A senseless act. When the Cairhienin king, in his hubris, had hewn down the sapling of the Tree of Life, _Avendoraldera_ given to them, the clans had poured over the Spine of the World like maddened _cafar-_ wasps whose hive had been destroyed. The world was not wide enough to hide Laman from the consequence of his sin. A _toh_ meted in blood. And yet, Laman's sin had a certain justification, perverse as it was. The man Laman Damodred intended the hallowed body of _Avendoraldera_ as a fane to his overweening pride. A throne.

 _Pride._

And yet.

Laman's offense was a terrible one, granted, deserving of a thousand deaths, but at its kernel was the grotesque water-bloated ignorance of the Wetlands. He had looked at a living creature, a representation of life itself, and seen mere lumber.

What the woman had done was infinitely worse. If pressed, Sorilea would have said such wanton violence was a man's work. It wasn't that women were incapable of evil. And yet, women brought forth life. Quickened. Gave birth. Knew the cost of bringing life into this world.

She had acted with open eyes, this bare-faced killer. There was no _purpose_ to her actions except malice for malice's sake. Sorilea had lived long enough to acquire a little wisdom. One thing she had learned was that some evil passed understanding. There was no _why._

 _Oh, but if I had her under my knife!_

Like an earthquake, the shock of the news had passed through the Aiel. There was incomprehension. Anxiety. Fear. A numbing grief. There was mounting anger, directionless at present, expressing itself in internecine fighting, the renewing of old feuds and hostilities. The pain the Aiel felt was deeply personal.

When the perpetrator was identified, the people would declare to the world the wrong they had suffered with unveiled faces as they sought redress – and the Creator have mercy on any who came between the Aiel and their vengeance then! But for now, it was a secret, jealously guarded, a taboo subject rarely discussed openly among the _algai'd'siswai_ around their fires, in the sweat-tents _._ Amongst the Wise Ones and the clan chiefs, however, there was no subject more pressing.

There was something, some indefinable quality in Shaiel's stance, the set of her shoulders, the readiness of her hands that radiated tension and a pain denied, something deeper than a girl's resentment. And yet, it was hard for Sorilea to bite her knife as the younger woman met her gaze right pertly, those malachite eyes arch, challenging under thunderhead eyebrows.

 _Her mother's eyes,_ Sorilea reflected. Standing this close to Shaiel was uncomfortable, feeling the nimbus of the young woman's _ara'i._ The daughter of the _Car'a'carn,_ her ability to channel was innate, and she held the Power constantly, even while sleeping. _Disquieting._

The road into Rhuidean was a snake sloughing a skin of sand. The two women reached the first outcropping buildings in tandem as the corona of the sun breached the eastern skyline, stippling the empty desert behind them with their long and slender shadows. Sorilea was conscious of the effort expended to match the rangy strides of Aviendha's daughter, the prickle of fatigue in her limbs. _Well._

 _Old age comes to us all. If we are lucky._

The streets were empty. Watchful. They continued in silence, cloth-wrapped feet mute upon the stone between the façade of white limestone. Shaiel had not spoken a word to Sorilea since they had broken their fast, a Gateway-jump and hundreds of leagues away in distant Malkier. Fine by her. Sorilea was not in the habit of making idle conversation. That said, the girl had better respond promptly and with courtesy when Sorilea had something to say, if she knew what was good for her!

The road ahead split around the keel of a tall building topped with a blade like a spear which pierced the dawn sky. The left-hand fork, presently obscured by buildings, led onto the central plaza where _Avendesora_ stood.

Where _Avendesora_ had stood.

Sorilea turned to Shaiel. "Prepare yourself."

The central square looked as though an angry giant had punched the ground in his wrath, throwing up concentric levees of earth propagating from the central point of impact. The huge stone flags that had paved the plaza followed the upheaval of the terrain as best they could, many cracking and splitting to reveal the soil beneath. At the epicentre stood all that remained of the Tree of Life.

Hessalam had done her work well. The fires that had engulfed _Avendesora_ had consumed her utterly, branch and leaf leaving a truncated and riven stump, like a jagged fang protruding from a deep crater gouged by the _chora_ itself as it fought valiantly for its life.

The scorched wood was black as tar, the deep taproots of the tree exposed, a palsied hand clenched in its thrawn death-rictus. The profane reek of seared timber impregnated the air. The fires had burned white-hot for a full day, despite the desperate efforts of the Aiel of Rhuidean to quench them.

Shaiel folded around the anguish she felt in the pit of her stomach, falling to her knees, hands groping blindly, grubbing in the dirt. The ruddy porphry of her unbound hair fell about her face, tears starting in her eyes. The taste of soot upon her tongue made her gag. Dimly, she was aware of Sorilea's hand upon her shoulder, bird-boned kindling wrapped in parchment, pressing with surprising strength. Offering a comfort she couldn't accept. This was a loss she wanted – needed – to feel.

Anger rose within her, a fire of white ashes burning in her belly. She surged to her feet galvanically, a graceful woman made ungainly, clumsy in her fury. Began running headlong to where the great tree had fallen. She stumbled mid-flight when a broken flagstone turned under her foot, and nearly fell, arresting the tumble with antelope-like agility. She could hear Sorilea's cries vainly pursuing her as she outstripped even the old woman's words.

She checked at the ragged lip of the crater, where the broken ground fell away precipitously before her, before scrambling down like a mountain-goat, careless of the stones she dislodged at her passing.

The broken plinth of _Avendesora_ reared up before her, and Shaiel scampered between two massive bulwarks of charcoal-black timber to throw herself prostrate, a supplicant at the foot of the Tree of Life, pressing her bare face, the palms of her hands against the cracked, fissured and blackened surface. She could hear herself keening, a wordless ululation that must be scraping her throat raw. Heard Sorilea cursing like a Stone Dog as she too tried to find a way down into the pit. None of that mattered. The Power rushed through her and without premeditation she reached out, Delving into the charred hulk of the Tree of Life. ..

She was _burning!_ Shaiel recoiled under the assault upon her senses, a plethora of images and feelings – so different, so _alien_ –rendered through her human sensory apparatus. Unquantifiable. The pain was _immense._ Immeasurable.

Shaiel relived the assault, the limbic system of the great tree visualising the square through the propagation of sound waves. She was blind, and yet she could see the hideous old woman's face, contorted with spite and anger as if she was tracing its contours with the palms of her hands. The pain she endured was more than a single person could bear. _Avendesora_ was – had been – something far greater and more unknowable than a single entity. It was a taproot of consciousness, with a symbiotic link to the Aiel people.

Shaiel screamed as she relived the _gai'shain_ throwing themselves into the fires in a vain attempt to extinguish the flames. She was them. She was the dying _chora_. She was a child, walking the deserted halls of the _chora'_ s mind, the dead wood impregnated with the fading residue of the Tree of Life's memories.

Shaiel could feel how _Avendesora_ had died, its presence retreating inch by inch and cell by cell under the hellish blast of fire, finding senescence as it grudgingly ceded the troves of memory to the flames. Three thousand years of experience, the lives of hundreds of thousands. The charred coals retained lingering impressions only, steeped in flames and torment, that would swiftly fade before being lost to the world forever.

Shaiel, desperate, sought the trace of life, though she no longer believed she would find any within the _chora_ 's shattered heart. At the least, she could bear witness to _Avendesora'_ s passing.

 _There!_ A bud, a flowering. A stirring, the faintest emanation deep within. Without thought, Shaiel began to draw upon the Power with all her strength. Hawsers of _saidar,_ braiding together kaleidoscopically. A flower of a thousand petals.

Healing an animal or a plant – anything non-human – was held to be an impossibility, Shaiel knew. Dangerous to the channeller, too. The thought was an abstraction, a distraction. She trusted her instincts. She might not be the most powerful channeller in history, but her relationship with _saidar_ – one she shared with her brothers and sister – was unprecedented in its intimacy. And yet this task was beyond even her strength. It was like trying to Heal multiple people at once. Another impossibility.

She reached out, desperate in her need, seeking another locus of energy. Her _ara'i_ swelled like a soap bubble, flexing and stretching painfully, as it sought amongst the detritus of Rhuidean for something she could use. An _angreal_ , a Well, anything. This place had once been a repository for objects of the Power. Perhaps some had been overlooked.

Ah… there was _something_ …She felt a static-electricity shock as she tried to draw though an object. A _ter'angreal_ , useless to her.

And then her aura brushed against something she _could_ draw upon. Negligible, barely a teacup's worth beside the torrent of _saidar_ she was already using. But something. She reached out through it, finding an unexpected resistance, breaking through the rind to the sweet fruit of the Power underneath.

This _angreal_ was unbuffered, and Shaiel drew upon it with a last flexing of her will. The web she was weaving – a hundred carpets-worth – snapped into place and, gasping with exertion, the young prodigy released both the weave and _saidar._

With an ominous creaking groan, the bole of _Avendesora_ fissured, ruptured, cracking open, and Shaiel was forced to adroitly leap aside to avoid being crushed under one of the massive pieces as it fell. Her heart lurched with hope, and with dread. Then with radiant joy as she saw a green shoot, a germ of life growing in the charred heartwood of _Avendesora._

Trembling with numinous awe, Shaiel reached out, and Delved. The seedling was strong and vital. Like a lusty babe in arms. And like a newborn child, it had no memories. There was life. But there was also loss.

Shaiel's joy was tempered with an abiding sorrow.

Like one awakening from a dream, Shaiel slowly rose to her feet, and turned to address Sorilea. The old woman looked as dazed as Shaiel felt. But as she became aware of Shaiel, Sorilea instinctively sank into a fighter's crouch, fingers darting towards her belt-knife with Maiden-trained reflexes. The Wise One looked angry. Teeth bared. And scared. Shaiel had though nothing could frighten that old buzzard.

 _Scared?_ Sorilea?

Sorilea's rheumy eyes stared accusingly into her own. "What did you _do_ to me?" she demanded of Shaiel, voice unsteady, fricative. Shaiel just looked at her, nonplussed. _Why, I did nothing.._

Understanding, when it came, was fully-formed. _Avendesora. Searching for other sources of power… Light!_ The 'object of Power' that she had found in her desperation to Heal the Tree of Life was no Well, _sa'angreal_ or _angreal._ It was Sorilea herself.

 _But that's impossible! Everyone knows you cannot force another woman to Link against her will!_ That was one of the basic precepts of forming Circles.

Except… Except that it was demonstrably false. The _a'dam,_ the Domination Band, could be used to force Linking. It was obvious, when one thought about it. Except that most decent people didn't _want_ to spend time thinking about such distasteful topics.

What she had done was evil. A violation. Shaiel looked at Sorilea, who was shaking her head slowly, as if in denial of what had just happened. "Stay away from me.." the Wise One mumbled. She looked withered. Desiccated. A husk. There was a cringing whine in Sorilea's voice that cut Shaiel to the quick. _Oh, Light. Light forgive me. What have I done?_ She started forward, to offer.. what? Comfort? Apology. The wordless plea in Sorilea's eye stayed her.

Drawing in upon herself, the Wise One turned away from Shaiel, and shambled, reeling away, pursued by Shaiel's desperate words.

"Sorilea? Wise One? I didn't mean to do it…. Come back. Please!"

The wind hollowed out her words. Cast them back upon Shaiel from the walls of shaped stone. Scattered them like chaff upon the desert.


	36. Chapter 36: The Ring Of Tamyrlin

**Chapter 36: The Ring of Tamyrlin**

The sun, inexorable, seared its preordained path in the ecliptic as Shaiel huddled, knees drawn up to her chest in reflexive self-comfort. The young Maiden remained sitting motionless where Sorilea had left her, at the base of the shattered Tree of Life, the finger of shadow she cast describing a sundial.

Lost in thought as she was, she was still dimly aware of the passage of time. In the Three-Fold Land, the sun was an imperative that could not be ignored. Now it plunged westward sharply, banking towards landfall, and the air it had stilled with its heavy hand was beginning to stir, a whisper of wind beginning the task of infilling Sorilea's footprints. It plucked at Shaiel's _cadin'sor,_ a clutching child's hand.

The swollen belly of a goat-hide waterskin sat stoppered on her hip, but not unused. She had rationed out water in a careful libation for the green shoots of _Avendesora._ Enough to nourish, but not an excess to drown the young _chora_.

Shaiel felt a yearning protectiveness for the fragile sapling, a tenderness she had not believed herself capable of. How coarse her callused hands felt, roughened by spear-shaft and knife-haft, and the endless abrading sands of the desert! How unsuited to the delicacy of what she felt. Yet she had not drunk from the skin herself.

It was foolishness to fast so, Shaiel knew, a juvenile, self-imposed penance. _Toh unmet makes the heart heavy._ It was a weight upon the shoulders, bowing her chin upon her chest. Even the sight of the new life she had brought forth was powerless to alleviate her burden.

 _Ji_ and _toh._ Simple syllables in the Old Tongue, the lodestones of an Aiel heart. Honour and obligation. The one ending where the other began, a snake consuming its tail, like the ring the Aes Sedai wore.

A mordant smile, the more plaintive for the youth of its wearer, traced Shaiel's lips. To her, Sorilea had been neither friend nor mentor. She was stern and hard and dry, with a heavy hand, and in truth, overbearing and not a little frightening.

Shaiel had only had occasion to speak with her a handful of times – 'speak with' would be an overstatement. _Sorilea_ spoke, and you answered, "Yes, Wise One!" Sorilea said "frog", and a woman hopped! Yet she felt she knew something of her, just the same. Her mother spoke of her often, and to Shaiel's surprise, with great fondness.

A favourite tale was of the day when in punishment for some long-forgotten offense ( _toh,_ once met, was not to be spoken of), Aviendha had been made to sift a heap of sand in search of one red grain. Telling the tale, her mother's eye had shaded with tenderness for one who had helped mold her into the woman she had become.

As with all tales from the days when the word of prophecy became flesh, it began or ended with the _Car'a'carn._ Her father, Rand al'Thor. Had the clans not crossed the Spine of the World in their search for He Who Comes with the Dawn – the man the Wetlanders called the Dragon Reborn and the Lord of the Morning – it would have been unlikely the old woman and Aviendha would have shared water and shade. They were from different clans.

It was a reflection on her melancholy that the bent of her thoughts turned to the man Rand al'Thor. Among her people, there was no stigma attached to illegitimacy. And yet his absence was an old injury.

Shaiel felt it in the spaces between people. The days where her mother drew from a well of silence. She felt it in the barbs jealous people cast, thorns that snagged in her flesh. Taunts often repaid by her quick fists and sharp tongue. She had toughened up. Grown lean and hard and confident. The vulnerable places were covered by callus. Only sometimes – in times of disappointment and doubt – did she allow herself to think of her father.

She had seen a picture of him, once, when she was a small child. A pencil sketch. In a book that a pedlar had tried to sell to her mother. A picture that was a true likeness, judging by the pang of longing and pain in her mother's green eyes.

Aviendha had sent the wetlander on his way with angry and scornful words. But Shaiel had followed him to where he made his camp, and had crept into his tent, stealing the page from the book as the man slept. She had kept her prize, creased with refolding, until the soft graphite the artist had used to mark the paper had smeared into illegibility.

Once, Shaiel had seen her mother drunk on _oosquai_ – once only, in a life defined by temperance and duty. Aviendha had been full of a baffled, directionless anger that had made Shaiel walk wide around her. It was only when her mother had wept that Shaiel had dared go to her, to comfort her in her grief. Aviendha had told her that night that she believed that Rand al'Thor was still alive.

For her part, Shaiel hoped that he was numbered among the honoured dead. What kind of a man abandoned his family? That night, Shaiel had destroyed the picture, tossing it into the glowing white embers of a fire, watching with dry eyes as the flames chased the margins of the parchment, curling them back upon themselves like the Fall leaves of the Wetlands.

Shaiel had understood then that the picture was an idolatry, the accuracy of the image notwithstanding, in the same way that holding on to the memories of a departed loved one was. The semblance of form did not hide that the image was a projection of her mind. Wish-fulfilment. Having the picture did not mean she knew her father. A hard lesson. Cleansing. The best lessons often were.

And now here she was again, like a dog returning to its vomit. _Enough with the self pity already,_ Shaiel scolded herself. Did she not have a wonderful mother as inspiration? Two strapping brothers in Alarch and Janduin – the one dark-haired as an Andorman, the other sun-haired and rangy, and a sister in Marinna, small and sweet-natured, as placid as she, Shaiel, was fiery.

So surprisingly dissimilar in looks and temperament the siblings were, and yet their bond was close. As if they were different parts of the same body. How could it not be so? The four of them had shared a womb. Many among the people went through life alone. And she had her sisters among the society. The Maidens. What of those who had neither the comfort of clan or society? The so-called _Mera'din,_ the 'Brotherless.'

Idly, Shaiel traced a long-fingered hand though the broken ground. The loam was dark and dank around where the Tree of Life grew, distinct from the sterile sands of the deep desert. It broke apart, crumbling under the pressure of her fingers. Shaiel's knuckles rapped a solid, regular protrusion in the dirt, the contact hard enough to sting. She frowned. A stone? More likely to be a root of the fallen tree.

Curious now, her hand gouged the soil. The surface was smooth, glass-slick. This was no natural object. Further examination revealed a convex surface, which tingled at her touch. Her eyes widened. Whatever it was, it was _warded._ She jerked her hand back as if she had been stung by a scorpion, her mother's warning alive in her mind. Such things were usually traps, sprung by human touch or channelling. She could not see the flows, but she could feel the web clinging to her fingers as she snatched them away. An inverted weave, then. Or male-wrought _saidin._

Her hand tingled, charged with invisible power, and she tensed, bracing herself. Was this the moment she awoke from the dream? Shaiel stayed very still, hardly daring to breathe as she felt the flows encircle her arms, invisible tendrils of the Power that probed. Their touch on her bare skin was silk-soft, but she could feel the massive, coiling power of the flows. _Like a great serpent, swallowing her arm._ The hairs on her arms rose, her flesh pebbled with goosebumps as the invisible jaws closed around her shoulder. This was the moment of truth.

Shaiel closed her eyes. Her lips moved, as if in prayer.

 _Wash the spears.._

 _Who fears to die?_

 _(To spit in Sightblinder's eye)_

 _..No-one I know!..._

 _(On the last day!)_

The serpent's jaws broke her skin.

 _(Blood of the Dragon! Body of the Great Serpent!)_

Shaiel's eyes opened, and she surged to her feet, expelling all the air in her lungs in an inchoate howl.

The young Maiden looked down, expecting her last sight to be her severed arm, her lifeblood spilling on the ground. Her body's water seeping into the soil. Her life given to nourish _Avendesora_ reborn. For an Aiel, there were worse ends.

Instead, she saw her upper arm encircled with a gossamer-fine tracing of crimson. A bead of blood welled, marring the symmetry of the annulus. What had just happened to her? The words, unbidden, rose in her mind. Words that were not her own.

 _The Great Serpent has spared you, leaving you unharmed. The Dragon had passed over you, knowing his own._

Shaiel shook her head, in dazed incomprehension. She moved her arm, tentatively, half-expecting a severed limb to fall from her shoulder. Nothing untoward happened. It seemed the voice she had heard in her mind – a voice like her own, but weathered with age, chastened with experience – had spoken true. She had been passed over. She had been spared.

 _(Body of the Great Serpent)_

A thought, a fleeting, vestigial echo. Then she felt the alien, yet strangely familiar, presence recede from her consciousness. She was alone once again.

She looked up into the twilight that had come up upon her in stealth, and down again to the object she had unearthed. It was an opaque cylinder of some vitreous material, a pace in length, and a hand's span in diameter. Under the cobalt sky, it gleamed a dark olive, a seamless receptacle. What _was_ it? Nothing about its dimensions or form gave any indication as to its purpose. It wasn't an _angreal,_ or yet a _ter'angreal._ She would have felt it at this proximity.

Shaiel squatted on her haunches, her powerful legs coiling like an antelope ready to spring, as she cautiously picked up the receptacle. The tube was _null._ Most objects could be discerned with the Power. This artefact was a blank to her through the eyes of Spirit. As if it was designed to shield the existence of its contents. Could it be opened?

An ancient object, guarded for three thousand years, hidden by design at the foot of _Avendesora._ Protected by the last of the great _chora._ It had lain here since the day the Aiel came to the Three-Fold Land, guarded unknowingly by the Aiel in a warded and secret city at the heart of the desert. Was it by chance, or design that it had fallen into her hand, here and now?

With an anticlimactic pop, the cylinder in her cupped hands broke apart longitudinally. Reflexively, Shaiel grabbed for the halves of the falling cylinder. Her left hand snagged one portion, just as her right-hand fumbled the other piece, the segment slipping from her grasp to smash on the ground with a sharp report. Her heart bolted like a frightened hare. Stupid, hapless, clumsy _child!_ She had found such a wondrous thing, and handled it as clumsily as a Stone Dog serving tea on a Sea Folk _raker,_ with the same unfortunate results for the crockery.

There was something in the half she had caught, and with greater care, she reached into the receptacle. There was a cylinder of tightly-rolled paper, the paper conforming to the shape of the container, and a small object, wrapped in layers of folded cloth.

The cloth was fine, dense, and gleamed in the dusk, seeming to pick up colours from her flesh and from the surroundings. Her breath caught. This was _streith._ A fabric rare beyond price, the art of whose making was lost in the Age of Legends. Save from a handful of items found among the possession of the Forsaken, it was all but unknown.

At the heart of the fabric was something small and hard. Shaiel handled the possession reverently. After fumbling the container, she didn't trust herself to unwrap the parcel just yet. Instead, she placed it carefully out of harm's way upon a smooth section of fire-blackened timber. Her attention turned to the manuscript, which she unrolled gently, with a reverence truly Aiel. Paper remained a rare commodity in the Waste.

It was a letter. Written in the Old Tongue, which Shaiel could read, if hesitantly. The dialect and phrasing were odd, almost stilted to her ear, which was only to be expected. Language changed quickly, and the Old Tongue had ceased to be a _lingua franca_ a thousand years ago. No original documents now remained from the Age of Legends – only copies of copies – and the few examples of the Old Tongue still extant from the time of the Breaking or before were to be found carved in stone, wrought into metal. And even granite was worn smooth in time, weathered by wind and rain.

Yet this document was crisp, the ink as fresh as if it had been placed into the tube but yesterday. Shaiel could only wonder at the arts that had preserved the parchment intact for so many centuries. Perhaps it was the container. Had it been a nullentropy tube? No matter. The missive was more important than the means of its preservation. Shaiel read with growing amazement as its import became clear.

 _Blood of my blood, blood of the Dragon, hile and witness the true words of your ancestor, Latra Posae Decumae, Aes Sedai, given into record sixty and three years after the Cataclysm that some call the Breaking._

 _The world I knew is overthrown, buried behind me. It may be that my name is reviled, or worse yet, forgotten. In my own time, I was known as the Artisan, and Shadar Nor, the Cutter of Shadows, and again as the False Steward, and finally as Mother, the name I bore with most fondness, given to me by your people and mine._

 _I will not seek to justify the deeds of my life. We were an arrogant people, great in knowledge and small in wisdom, and in hubris, we left the door ajar for_ Shai'tan _to breach the world of flesh. And we all bear the bloodguilt for the Apocalypse, and a world cast under the Shadow._

 _My words are a message in a bottle, cast into the ocean that is Time, where they will wash up upon a foreign shore for you to read. Unless the Dark Foe overthrows the Wheel and all is extinguished._

 _Know this: I never foreswore the Light. Everything I did, every act of valour and every betrayal, was part of the great conflict, of which every faithful soldier knows only his part in the greater design. Even one such as myself, the Cutter of Shadows, and even He Who Comes with the Dawn. We were rivals, he and I, then companions in arms, but never friends. I honour his memory as a great warrior for the Light, but I loved him not. I admit it frankly._

 _I struggled with this man all the days of my life. We were reluctant comrades, at best, and ever we contended with each other, the more so when we were yoked together to fight_ Caisen Hob _and his acolytes. At times, I hated him, and he me. And yet we would each have given our life for the other. You know whereof I speak, you who are_ Far Dareis Mai. _The bonds forged by battle are stronger even than the call of blood._

 _As the War of Power raged, I held his life in my hands many times, and never played him false. Until, at last, in his moment of greatest need, I deserted him. Indeed, I dared even more. He was my captain, and I stole from him the greatest weapon he possessed._

 _It was necessary. With that weapon, he could have compelled us all to aid him against our will – all the female Aes Sedai. And he would have done it. His need was great, as was his fear. If he had done such a dark deed, he would not have prevailed when he faced the Lord of the Grave, even though he had the might of arms. He would have fallen, and become as Ishamael instead. And if we women had given him succour, the Dark One would have tainted both halves of the One Power, and the world and the Wheel itself would have been broken asunder. Irrevocably destroyed._

 _The necessity of it does not mitigate our actions. What we did was unforgivable. We women betrayed the men, sacrificed them to madness and ruin to preserve the world. I betrayed my brother to spare my sisters._

 _Despite our perfidy, they chose to go to the Bore anyway, to make their stand. Chose to fight and die for us. Just as the menfolk of the Aiel who discover they can channel have done for three thousand years after, taking their spears, leaving sept and society to travel alone into the Blight to fight the Lord of the Grave._

 _Make no mistake, Lews Therin was a great man, whatever our differences, whatever his flaws. He might have been a product of his time and his class, but he had the heart of an Aiel. I give him honour._

 _The great calling of my life was to fight the Shadow. To that end, I would betray even my kin, and bring great dishonour and shame upon a once-honoured name. It was for that hallowed purpose that I did betray your sire, the Dragon, Lews Therin Telamon._

 _Know then, I did not my treason from jealousy, nor yet for hope of gain, but only under the duress that is Prophecy. I swear it by my hope of salvation and rebirth, and you yourself are witness to the truth of my words. The ward by which I protect both words and legacy is keyed only to my being. If you are reading this missive, you are my soul, once again quickened in the world of flesh. Your very life is the proof that I did what I must._

 _You stand upon the cusp of something. A profound blackness lies before you, nameless and vast, that the eyes of spirit cannot penetrate. I have walked the tracts of future lives, through the glass columns of the_ ter'angreal _, and again through the prophecy of Foretelling, yet I cannot see past this moment. I see you, and my heart swells with pride, for you are fair and fell, blood of my blood. Yet, I grieve. I feel your shame, and I know its cause._

 _It is ever the curse of my house and line, the nexus of power and need. To reach out in pride, glorying in the strength of your hand, decisive, overweening in your competence, even deigning to manipulate the lives of others. Strength like yours, talents like yours – like ours – demand to be used. Why then should we make way for lesser men and women, humouring their petty jealousies and conceits, when we can see clearly to the heart of great designs, and our hand is strong and sure? Why indeed?_

 _It was my way for many years. It was also the way of Mierin Eronaille, who became Lanfear the Forsaken, and the way of many others. They were once the best and brightest stars among us, yet they brought a ruin which almost overturned the world, when they fell upon the Earth in their wrath and pride. And I tell you true that I was only spared such a fate – to serve the Shadow in might and from my own free will – by the grace of the Light. As it was, I occasioned much grief to others, and much rue unto myself._

 _I could staunch your wound by telling you that which you already know, that you acted without knowledge, unwitting. For you did not not intend to harm Sorilea. You did not, in fact, even know she was there. And yet you have already intuited that somehow, even this truth does not exonerate you, and that you have_ toh _to Sorilea regardless of your intent. Child, I let you burn your hand now, so that in the future, you will treat the flame with more regard. Because I must._

 _I give you a perilous trust. The imperative of your heritage sings in your veins, the commingling of my blood and that of the Dragon. It falls to you, as it has fallen to me in my time._

 _The gift I bestow should frighten and appal you. The artefact is the great_ angreal _known as the Ring of Tamyrlin. It will augment your power exponentially. The creation of such devices – or at least their existence – must be known among the Aiel – many such artefacts did I leave here in Rhuidean, including the access keys to the Choedan Kal._

 _And yet, the Ring of Tamyrlin is greater. Potentially, far more dangerous. It is also a_ ter'angreal _whose true function is a jealously-guarded secret. It allows the wielder to wrest control of any other_ angreal _or_ sa'angreal _whatsoever, whether they are flawed like Callandor or no._

 _By the same means, they allow the bearer to seize control of another channeller, as if they were themselves no more than an inert object, allowing you to link with them against their will. A terrible and forbidden thing. To draw upon a person as if they were a mere_ angreal _or a Well._

 _And yet, you must know in your heart of hearts that this purpose is mandated by the paradigm. Proof of concept is extant. Objects of the Power have been created – requiring flesh-to-flesh contact – that enable forced linking. If you do not know of such objects, I shall not tell you how they are fashioned. They are an abomination. An affront to the dignity and autonomy of the person. One which I co-authored with Lews Therin, to our shame, and yet for our edification._

 _Despite this, I give you something far worse, that allows you to co-opt whole Circles, without apparent limit. I give it to you because I believe that your need – the need of your people, and perhaps the Wheel itself – is that great. Perhaps it will fall to you, or to another, to use it. To become_ da'tsang _so that the world might live. For myself, it was a price I was willing to pay a hundred-fold, and I accounted it a bargain. If that moment is yours, do not balk at the cost._

 _For you have unwittingly stumbled upon another forbidden truth. Rarest among the wild Talents, there are those who can 'crack' another channeller. To a limited extent, they can replicate what the Ring of Tamyrlin allows any channeller to accomplish._

 _They can seize control of another person, break through the resistance of that person's will, and draw the One Power through them, effectively allowing them to control a Circle of two persons. I myself had this Talent, and together with Lews Therin, I mapped its limitations. A person's ability to resist is dependent upon their strength of will coupled with their strength in the Power. One person is the limit – at least for myself._

 _I am no theosophist, but I believe that the ability to channel is part of the Creator, made manifest in humanity – a portion of His ineffable spirit – and that likewise, the Dragon is, however unwitting, part of His body. And so it must surely be that the Talents – even the Talent to Force, must be part of his design, and not of the Adversary._ Shai'tan _can only unmake and mar, perverting the design of what is. So, I have come to believe that the Creator intends this ability to be used. But only at the greatest of need._

 _I only found but one other with the ability in many years of study. A man once called Elan Morin Tedronai, who was once friend to Lews Therin Telamon, but who in latter years fell into the Shadow and became the Betrayer of Hope. We wiped his mind of the knowledge of his Talent against his will, the Dragon and I. We deemed it a knowledge too dangerous for another to bear._

 _Another grievous sin. Oh, Light, my daughter, I carry so many! I shall be glad to lay them down and rest when my watch is done._

 _I want to tell you more. All that I have seen, all I have experienced. To guide you. I dare not. Indeed, I already fear I have already said too much. Who can say what will be remembered, and what forgotten as the Wheel turns?_

 _The future is a pool of still water. Actions, even knowledge, are like a stone dropped in the water. The ripples propagate, creating consequences beyond imagining. Harmonies and dissonances, with only the fundamental frequencies known – the periodicity of the Ages, and the central cast of the greater and lesser_ ta'veren.

 _Do not speak of what you have learned in this letter to another. Not even to your mother, nor yet your siblings. Instead, seek out your father. Despite what you may have been told, he lives still. You will find him among the old blood of Aramaelle. A man I took to be their liege knows him. I saw them together in a Foretelling. The Dragon's face was different – dark of hair and cold of mien – but I still knew him. I would know him anywhere._

 _The other man in my vision – the Aramaellin – wears the_ hadori _of his people, and he is cast in the stamp of the mighty men of his race. He is a tall man, with chilling blue eyes and a face of weathered granite, and he carries himself like a warrior and a knight. An old man, with hair grey as iron, but perilous, I deem. In my time, I knew many such men._

 _I took him to be their King because of his noble bearing, and because he bears the sigil of his house. A golden ring, insigned with a flying crane over a lance and coronet. Find him, and you will find the Lord of the Morning. The Dragon Reborn. And for the Light's sake, be quick about it, my girl! There is very little time._

 _The Creator is full of mercy,_ Shaiel _. He allows us to sleep, and awake with no recollection of what we have done, of what has gone before. We get to try again. To rise in youth like eagles, with the wind under our wings. We get to learn to live, to love, afresh. And at the end of the path, we find the forgiveness of the grave._

 _May you be strong where I was weak. May you be true where I was false. And may you lead by example, not by bending others to your will, as I all too often did._

 _There is always time for love._

 _May your life be a spear, aimed at Sightblinder's heart._

 _Mother._


	37. Chapter 37: Sunhair

**Chapter 37: Sunhair**

Moghedien could feel the presence of Moridin, an angry, unwelcome tangle in her breast like a knot of barbed wire. It seemed that he had learned to blunt the Warder-bond, denying her the vantage into his mind, soul and spirit she had initially experienced. She hadn't known it was possible to do that with the Warder bond. Then again, there was much she did not know.

She had been surprised by the emotions that predominated Moridin's emotional landscape. The anger roiling beneath the cold and polished _cuendillar_ of his urbane cruelty was unsurprising. She had expected to find his heart a sterile topography of polished metal, scoured to a keen and jagged edge by the tempest of his wrath. Instead, probing the depths of Moridin's emotions had plunged her into an abyss of breathtaking pain.

Moridin was quite insane, as she had long suspected, driven mad by a dread he drowned out with the excess of violence he mistook for control. His mind was a terrifying place, even for her, accustomed as she was to the hectoring demands of her own fear. She feared the designs of other people, who had to be leashed, subjugated or destroyed in order that they did not threaten her.

By contrast, Moridin cared nothing for himself. Instead, his eyes of his spirit were dazzled by the beauty of what he saw in the living things around him, and overthrown with the inevitability of their corruption, degradation and annihilation.

When Elan Morin had first learned to kill, he had done it as an act of mercy, of preservation, born of a desperation to withhold something pure and unspoiled from the sullying, marring corruption of the Great Lord. To his despair and horror, he had swiftly learned to delight in the infliction of death and torment, all the while retaining the empathy that characterised him, feeling himself become one with the corruption of the world.

Now he killed others indiscriminately because he could not kill himself, could not break free from the Great Lord's design. Moghedien saw herself through his eyes and was staggered for the first time. Not for the ugliness she expected, the cruelty and selfishness that characterised the way she knowingly lived her life.

Moridin's regard encompassed all that and more, and she experienced the depth of hatred for her that she expected to find, the lust to break and harm her in every conceivable manner, as dreadful and implacable as Semirhage's toying cruelty in its own way, the more so for being so deeply _personal_ in nature.

And yet there was something unexpected that baffled her, that terrified her and made her flee his mind in alarm. He saw something redeemable in her. A part of her that merited compassion. Something ineluctable, something worthy even of love. And a grief that she too had become part of the death of the world. Her heart roiled, angry, bitter and scornful, wanting to reject what she had seen. What possible truth could she hope to find in a madman's heart? And yet she couldn't.

She looked into his eyes, and trembled. Fathomless depths that betrayed nothing of the discord raging within. No _saa_ marred this Moridin's unblinking gaze. This man had never been gifted the True Power. Another difference. Was that the reason he lived whilst his duplicate in this world had perished? Was it unimportant, or a detail upon which _worlds_ turned?

"Get out of my _mind._ " Moridin spoke softly, implacably. "Or I'll kill you where you stand."

They faced each other upon the rooftop of an inn called Culain's Hound. The public house was cheap and crude. They hadn't chosen it for its amenities. All that mattered was the location.

Standing three stories high, the stone-built building surmounted with a roof of red tile overtopped most of the neighbouring buildings in the New City district of Caemlyn. It gave them a vantage point above the streets and byways of the city lying between the perimeter wall of bluff grey stone and the towering height of the Ogier-crafted escarpment of the Old City, rising like a dream from the rude tenements of the lower city, its walls a dazzling white whose gleam was given by tiny flakes of lustrous mica impregnating the stone.

Caemlyn was a huge city, even by the standards of the Age of Legends, Moghedien reflected, the surrounding walls enclosing an area greater than fifty square miles. But they had not come here for the purpose of sightseeing, but instead, surveillance. They had been here two days, walking the streets and byways, learning the area for Travelling.

It was almost ironic. Most of their methodology had been appropriated from the exploits of Lews Therin. Their enemy had pretty much written the book on covert expeditions and assassination within enemy strongholds throughout the War of Power, winnowing the number of Chosen from several score to a mere thirteen of the strongest and luckiest. Now they would use his own tactics for an audacious attack upon the spouse of the Dragon Reborn. The Andoran Queen, Elayne Trakand.

In truth, they had anticipated an easier task. It transpired that these primitives had adapted swiftly to the demands of warfare in a world of Gateways, Compulsion and One Power-enabled disguise. The two Forsaken reluctantly abandoned their initial idea of a direct assault upon the Queen in the Royal Palace, or even within the confines of the Old City. It was too well-guarded, crisscrossed by the constant comings and goings of Aiel Wise Ones, Aes Sedai emissaries, the Kin and even _Asha'man_ from the Black Tower.

The Palace itself was a black-box problem. You needed to have spent some considerable time there to learn the place in order to Gateway in – or out, even if a person was familiar with the layout. Even then, their problems might not be over.

Moridin had told her of an occasion where one of those Aiel wilders had actually unpicked a Gateway, an impressive demonstration that highlighted their knowledge of the practicality of reading residues and following a Gateway to its destination. The Andoran chit herself had been there on that occasion.

A sobering thought. The last thing they wanted was to make good their escape and be tracked to their bolthole by a bunch of irate Aes Sedai. Given sufficient time to plan an operation, an attack upon the Palace would be potentially feasible. But why overcomplicate matters?

Moridin had cut to the heart of things. "These people aren't like us" was his dry summation. "We don't need to attack them in a place of their choosing. We will prey upon the weaknesses that they consider their strength. We ambush them when they visit their loved ones. Or when they go to visit the graves of their dearly departed."

After Moghedien insight into Moridin's twisted mind, she wasn't sure how immune he was to the weaknesses of the Lightfriends he claimed to despise. But his analysis made perfect sense, nevertheless.

One of the new buildings dominating the Lower City was the squat, unlovely edifice of the Minster of the Light. Among other trinkets, it housed the ashes of none other than the Dragon Reborn. To be more precise, it housed the ashes of Rand al'Thor, a distinction which would have made a very great difference to Elayne Trakand, did she but know of it. Customarily, she visited it once a year on the anniversary of the Last Battle, which had become a public day of remembrance, of celebration and commemoration tinged with mourning.

That day was today. The Forsaken's plans were laid, and already were set in motion. Weak minds had been destabilized, goaded into action with a delicate touch of Compulsion. Sophisticated traps had been primed and readied. Moments only remained before their foe would step unwittingly into the ground they had prepared for her.

Moghedien immersed herself the One Power, relishing the delectable wholeness and sweetness that suffused her being, so different from the rancid filth of polluted _saidar_ she had experienced in the Shadow-world they had so recently left.

She wove Air. A simple trick, creating a thick lens a half-yard across to focus and diffuse light, like the telescopes she had known so many Ages ago. Because of the potential presence of so many enemy channellers in the City, she did not dare to use the trick of using small pinpoint Gateways far above to spy on the Queen's procession. Instead, she could scry them safely from a distance, without fear of discovery. It required comparatively little of the Power.

She could feel Moridin's presence at her shoulder as he looked into the lens, as she scanned the designated street a half-mile distant, watching her quarry approach.

Through it, Moghedien watched her minions take their prearranged places. Angry zealots that the merest brush of Compulsion had precipitated into desperate action. What she had done was so subtle as to pass undetected even in the unlikely eventuality that the luckless individuals were Delved by an Aes Sedai.

There she was. The Andoran Queen, arrogant in white, proud and seemingly invulnerable, protected by a thin shell of armed retainers. A short, foppishly-dressed red-haired man scurried in her wake. The so-called 'Prince of the Sword'. She could feel Moridin's scorn mirroring her own derision as she observed him.

Flanking the Prince of the Sword came two tall men, alike as brothers, wearing the familiar high-collared black coats of _Asha'man_. There lay the real danger.

Moridin's trained eye quickly identified a screen of concealed picquets occupying the rooftops, men armed with crossbows. These he dismissed as a realistic threat. But she could feel his fascination with the woman in white through the Warder bond. The itch at the back of a person's mind when they are trying to recall who someone reminds them of.

The procession slowed as the street narrowed, and she felt Moridin's focus shift as their quarry reached the prearranged spot. Their eyes met.

"Now?" Moghedien queried. Her heart hammered with anticipation. With _fear._

"Now!" Moridin confirmed urgently.

Synchronously, two Gateways snapped into being. _Decidedly, there were distinct advantages to the Warder-bond_ , Moghedien reflected as she stepped through the doorway, _saidar_ thrilling her with readiness, giving her the conviction to master her apprehension and enter the arena of conflict. _As long as you were the one who held the reins._

* * *

Garbed in cloth-of gold emblazoned with white roses and the silver anvil that was the sigil of his house, Taringail Mantear appeared the very epitome of an arrogant Andoran nobleman, a short and stocky man with the nervous energy of a bantam rooster. The kind of man that fair bristled over imagined slights.

The ruddy gold of his hair attested to his heritage, a bloodline that included his second-cousin, Elayne Trakand, by the Light's grace Queen of Andor, and through his great-aunt Tigraine, the Dragon Reborn himself. Little wonder this robin-redbreast was puffed-up, then. And no wonder that he was the Queen's First Prince of the Sword, the nobility of his birth ensured that, mitigating whatever flaws of character the young firebrand might possess.

Rumours abounded that the Prince was no stranger to license and excess, his florid countenance doubtless due to an over-fondness for the good red wine of Andor. Those who listened to such rumours also remarked on the unfortunately squeaky timbre of his voice, a trait even more pronounced when his ire was roused. And any discussion of the merits of young Taringail concluded with the observation that he had the Mantear temper, a choleric young sprig from an illustrious history of hotheads. A line that had produced such bad apples as Luc Mantear. Luc the Slayer, who had served the Shadow, bringing infamy to his House.

Those prone to such observations saw what they wanted to see. They missed the fact that the elegant cut of the Prince's beautifully-tailored coat, artfully loose, allowed unrestricted access to the long sword at his hip, and permitted unencumbered freedom of motion once the steel had been unlimbered. They overlooked that his broad-brimmed velveteen hat with its cockscomb of feathers was practical apparel, preventing his gaze from being dazzled by the sun's glare. His knee-high boots of tanned calfskin concealed two matching daggers, the short blades perfectly weighted for throwing. The boots themselves were soled with a soft latex rubber imported from Seanchan that allowed a sure grip upon the muddy cobbles of Caemlyn's streets.

The onlookers saw the confection of finery that the Prince of the Sword sported, and misapprehended the stamp of the man who wore them. Which was his design.

Taringail Mantear was far more than a perfumed courtier. He saw himself as the last line of defence for his Queen, Elayne of the House Trakand, a woman whom he regarded with a respect that bordered on outright worship, and he took his duty seriously. Seriously enough to have been the author of many of the disparaging rumours surrounding his own proclivities.

In fact, Taringail was Warder-trained, his compact frame well-defined muscle under the gorgeous clothing, and he affected the clumsy gait of the unfit and untrained rather than gliding in the arrogant saunter of Cat Crosses the Courtyard, the loose cut of his clothing giving him a deceptively husky-looking build, concealing the leonine musculature he in fact possessed.

Under the concealment of his broad-brimmed hat, his eyes were like a scalpel, ceaselessly vigilant. His back itched with anticipation of an arrow being buried in it at any given moment.

The truth was, a close protection detail like this in the packed street of the Capital afforded countless opportunities for ambuscade and assassination. He had done what he could to even the odds. He had archers on rooftops overlooking the intended route, had cordoned off areas where he felt the risk to the Queen's person were too great, and had enfiladed the crowds with his agents, sharp-eyed men trained to observe the signs of danger. The bloodless face and intent gaze of those about to kill.

But Taringail knew well that all these precautions were all but useless against a fanatic. Someone who was willing to pay the ultimate price in order to assassinate the Queen of Andor.

Enemies within and without. It was enough to drive a man mad. Security had been ramped up in the last five years. It had all been the fault of the so-called 'Church of the Dragon'. The movement had started as a breakaway sect amongst the Dragonsworn that had returned from the Last Battle.

As a general rule, Andorans were lax in their observance of the Creator. To most, He was a distant figure, an enigma wrapped in the Light. The Dragon Reborn had given Him a human face, anthropomorphised Him.

Instead of being a figure of fear and numinous dread second only to the Dark One, as the original Dragon, Lews Therin Telamon had been in his excesses and violent end, the Dragon Reborn was the messianic figure at the heart of an evangelical movement. To these devotees, Rand al'Thor was nothing less than the Creator made flesh.

As such, mentioning his very name amounted to blasphemy, even owning a picture of the Dragon tantamount to idolatry. _The Dragon is the Light clothed in flesh, and Masema Dagar is his Prophet._ In Taringail's opinion, it was a grand nonsense. Dangerous nonsense at that, and probably blasphemous in truth. Rand al'Thor had been a _man._ Nothing more, nothing less.

Now the men and women who wore the intertwined black-and-white symbol of the unbroken Aes Sedai posed the most significant threat to the life of the Andoran Queen and her children. Elayne had been the Dragon Reborn's lover, and bore his children – a fact she had made public knowledge.

Of course, to the Dragonsworn rabble, that claim was anathema, making Elayne Trakand a heretic and sorceress. Taringail had read the threatening letters himself: _Recant, ye fallen woman, or die with your foul lies in your mouth._

The shadow of a frown crossed his face as he caught a fleeting glance of the Queen's immaculately coiffured hair between the barbed points of her personal guard's helmets. The Queensguard were an elite all-female unit, fine-looking soldiers in their new cream-lacquered breastplates, snowleopard pelt cloaks swirling, proud as any _Gaidin_. The snarling White Lion of Andor enamelled on their breast brilliant as the Light, outshining even the gilt trimming.

Drawing inspiration from Brigitte Trahelion, the Queen's former Warder and from the Seanchan Fists of Heaven, the women wearing the White and Crown were an outstanding force, Warder-schooled with the sword and Two Rivers-trained with the bow as part of the concord between Andor and the breakaway nation on its flanks.

Taringail's misgivings were not due to their sex. The Seanchan had shown the world what women warriors could do. In some ways, the Queensguard was an excellent idea, surrounding the monarch with a force her enemies might underestimate, to their cost. But in the Queensguard, as with the Fists of Heaven, the training favoured quick, slight women who could run all day like an Aiel Maiden and fight a battle at the end of it.

They weren't suited for this kind of close-protection detail. For this, you wanted big burly fellows, with heavy shield and lamellar plate armour. Because at the end of the day, their duty was to soak up punishment. To be a physical bulwark protecting their charge.

Taringail caught the eye of their captain, and the two of them shared a terse look, Zarine Char's snarling saber-toothed lion helmet turning to his, fangs framing her countenance, fierce and frank. A leader's greathelm, showing her face, bared like a blade in service, that her soldiers might rally upon her and take heart in extremity. Captain Char's was charged with their mutual anxiety. There was little love lost between Warder and Captain, but there was mutual respect.

Zarine Char was a seamstress's daughter, father unknown. They came from different worlds, but were united in their calling, and the diligence with which they pursued it. As Prince of the Sword, Taringail had ultimate authority over the disposition of the Queensguard. In practice, Captain Char ran the outfit, and he made suggestions. Suggestions which only carried the weight they did because the Queensguard knew how diligently Taringail Mantear applied himself, training body and mind zealously, seeking every edge, every advantage to be the best warrior and leader he could be.

It was necessary. To his mind, the world was a far more dangerous place than it had been before _Tarmon Gai'don_. Where previously, Andor's place had been secure among the Westland nations, the world had grown larger. There were powers in the world – Seanchan and Shara – compared with whom Andor was stagnant, fifty to a hundred years behind technologically. They had battle-tested armies, whereas Andor had only the veterans of the Last Battle to draw upon to stiffen her ranks, many now greybeards or pensioned off.

It could even be argued that Andor was not even the greatest power within its own borders! The Dark Tower overshadowed Caemlyn. It hadn't been but twenty-five years ago that Logain Ablar had been led, shackled and caged like an animal through the capital's streets, the prisoner of the Red Ajah, attaindered as a False Dragon. Now he wielded dominion as the _M'hael_ , first among the _Asha'man_. Men who channelled the One Power.

Logain wasn't the kind of man to forget a slight like that. Great men made the most abiding enemies. Yet the Black Tower and Andor were bound together by need. The Seanchan waged a propaganda war through their schools and emissaries – their freedom of speech protected by treaty – and their rhetoric against the two Towers, both White and Black, found fertile soil to germinate. The Raven Empire made no secret of its intentions towards the _Asha'man_. They intended to hunt every last one down and exterminate them.

Finding their way in the new world order was like sailing the Fingers of the Dragon blindfolded in a riptide, and Taringail firmly believed that only Queen Elayne had the courage and the prescience to secure Andor's future. She was the physical embodiment of the marriage of Andor to both the White Tower – as both Queen and Aes Sedai – and to the Black Tower through the Warder-bond in a way that nobody else could be. It was her burden and hers alone to create the confederation of alliances that would ensure past the inevitable breach of the Dragon's Peace.

It was coming. Taringail could smell it on the wind – the acrid reek of Dragon fire and blood. He could only pray that when that time came, they were ready. That was why he trained so assiduously. The reason the goad of his tongue was felt by Zarine Char, a good and diligent soldier. He demanded _perfection._ Nothing less would suffice.

 _Marginal gains._ Everything optimised for performance, like the sword on his left hip, slung low and carried with casual menace. Watered Andoran steel, exceedingly long and narrow, with a knotwork hilt, it raised eyebrows amongst those who knew blades and the men who bore them. The blacksmith he had set to purpose had called it a 'tuck', when the Prince of the Sword had shown him the diagram. Had all but rolled his eyes, before knuckling down and making the thing, as specified. He was still getting paid after all, a fine price for a custom piece, and what concern of his was it, what some fool noble imagined a fancy sword should be?

But it wasn't a tuck. The drawing – if germane, likely a copy of a copy – purported to be of an _osan'gar_ – an archaic duelling-sword from the Age of Legends, part of a matching pair, with a dagger in the other hand. A rarified and quite nasty art, and a popular blood-sport in certain circles.

The _osan'gar_ might look like some fool noble's court sword, but it was anything but. The rapier was light, lightning in the draw and deadly quick in the lunge. A meagre pound in weight, with a robust triangular cross-section to the blade, the duelling sword possessed a pliant strength that pleasantly surprised. It was light in the cut, true, and no good against a breastplate, but then again, most of his adversaries wouldn't be wearing armour. The Queen's would-be assailants typically presented in fine court clothes, with bows and smiles and black treason in their hearts.

 _What you gain on the swings, you lose on the roundabouts._ A cut with a two-handed sword, two pounds of hard-swung steel put you down, there and then. You could give a man his death with the _osan'gar_ , and he'd hardly feel it. Straight through the body, and he'd still be hot for your blood. Dead by nightfall, though. It killed. That was what counted.

Taringail could draw and open a throat before his man bared a foot and a half of steel. Had practiced that stop-thrust ten thousand times. Sitting. Standing. Running. It made no odds.

What was it they said? _Not as deep as a well, or as wide as the alehouse door, but you are served ,just the same._

For his part, Taringail wouldn't feel comfortable until they made it safely back to the Palace. It was foolishness, this procession. The Prince of the Sword visualised the City of Caemlyn as a concentric series of boxes. Each layer more secure than the last. The New City of Caemlyn, between the outer walls of grey stone and the Old City walls of glistening white was where their route lay.

Taringail noted the new stone infilling the breaches in the Capital's walls. Human work, inferior to the original Ogier-wrought masonry of the inner defences, filling the gouges the One Power had inflicted upon the imposing battlements.

During the Last Battle, Caemlyn had fallen to the hordes of Trollocs and Halfmen, Dreadlords opening Gateways into the city's heart, innumerable legions breaching the defences through the Waygate. The defenders of the City – a strong contingent of mercenaries and Andormen – had fought doughtily, but inevitably failed to hold out against the tide.

An illustration of how frangible it all was. The illusion of security afforded by walls and gates. The only true bulwark was one of flesh and blood. Men and women who were prepared to do whatever it took. To live as an Andoran, and to die as one!

Gateways had changed everything. Protecting the monarch had become a matter of information jealously guarded. In lieu of walls and bars, trust was placed in watchwords and countersigns, crypts and ciphers, and in unceasing vigilance. The only place offering a modicum of physical security was the Queen's apartments, within the Royal Palace. By restricting access to a handful of trusted people, the possibility of an intruder learning the area well enough to Travel there was mitigated considerably.

It could still be done, Taringail knew all too well. A channeller wearing the Mask of Mists could don the likeness of another, potentially getting close enough to the target to do harm. The Inner Palace was warded now against such subterfuge, the weave an extrapolation from one of Cadsuane Melaidhrin's paralis-net _ter'angreals_ that caused the Mask of Mirrors to slip, revealing the wearer's true face. It was precious little comfort. Their enemies were ingenious and numerous. Some day, someone would find a way.

Taringail's practised eye scanned the sea of jostling faces. The Andoran capital had been defiled, and many folk had not wished to return after _Tarmon Gai'don_. The First Prince of the Sword knew his history. It was one of the ways a city died.

Caemlyn had been a burning brand, snatched from the fire. The Battle of Braem Wood and its aftermath had seen the great city retaken, its walls overthrown by the Power. Caemlyn had not lain long under the Shadow, but it had been desecrated. Reclaiming a city was more than recovering territory. The land remembered.

It took time to consecrate and renew once-hallowed ground, to make the place somewhere humans would readily indwell. And some things, once lost, would never be recovered from the ashes. Many buildings remained derelict, unsafe tenements gutted by the flames, roofless walls a heartless shell. The remnants of the _stedding_ around the Waygate had been sterilized by fire, the Gate shut forever. The Ogier shunned Caemlyn now. Yet the people who had remained were a hardy sort, and many cheered the warrior Queen lustily, faces wreathed in smiles.

Taringail let his training take over, as his Warder mentors had taught him. Harnessing that atavistic, primal hindbrain, the unconscious animal instincts that recognised a predator, someone moving against the shoaling flow of the crowd. Someone stalking. Hunting.

 _There._ The crowd unconsciously making room for them. Two men and one woman, pushing their way through the jostling throng. The woman's eyes were intent, pupils dilated. Perhaps under the influence of narcotics?

Deep in the Void, Taringail could make out the inane mantra she was muttering, inciting herself to violence. A litany in praise of the Dragon Reborn. _A fanatic._ The two men already had long knives in their hands. They had the gait of trained men, those accustomed to violence. _Veterans_ , Taringail surmised, as he observed their hands. Inexperienced fighters tensed up, knuckles white with tension as they clenched their weapons in fists. These two were limber. Loose. Ready.

"WARE!" Taringail shouted at the top of his lungs, drawing steel in the same instant. "Protect the Queen!"

To his relief, the Queensguard responded with alacrity, just as they had practiced, the hollow box of soldiers surrounding the Andoran monarch hardening, forming into a fighting wedge pointing towards the assailants. Cries of alarm from the crowd as the soldiers braced, levelling swords, the hedge of sword points forcing the crowd to back away.

Taringail could hear Zarine barking commands as she placed herself at the centre of the wedge. The optimal place to direct operations. The rear two ranks pivoted smoothly, moving with alacrity but without panic, unlimbering bows, scanning the street behind for other potential assailants. Taringail took his designated position beside the Queen. Elayne's face was flushed, contorted in a snarl of righteous anger. Aes Sedai poise be damned! He did not doubt that she was full to bursting with _saidar._

To Taringail's relief the crowd ahead broke, scattering like quail, wanting no part of the armed confrontation. Just as well. The armed detail had been instructed to cut a path to safety, if one was needed. Another reason the Queensguard needed to be big shoulderthumpers with braw shields. A shield was a bludgeoning weapon, fit to purpose. One that wouldn't leave the streets of the Andoran capital littered with the bodies of Her Majesty's subjects. Light! When this was over, he intended to make his views on this subject known to the Queen. Pointedly.

The onrushing attackers were undeterred by the readiness of the defenders, the bristling wall of unsheathed swords. With a shout, they charged. The woman fanatic was the first to die, cut down in a heartbeat, falling like scythed wheat as the two male assailants fell upon the point-woman at the head of the wedge. She went down fighting, sword bloodied, under a flurry of chopping knife-blows, the pristine white of her tabard crimsoned with a sunrise spatter of her blood.

Anger crackled like winter lightning outside the Void. Taringail knew all of the Queensguard soldiers personally. Some he had known for a half-dozen years. Cheerful, uncomplaining and resolute, Elise had just returned to active duties after bearing her first child. He had been to her bloody wedding, even made a voluble speech, incited by the liquid courage afforded him by a fine Andoran vintage. He didn't regret a single word. She was – had – epitomised all that was worthy among the woman soldiers who protected the Queen.

Taringail wanted nothing more than to shove his way through the fray, and slake his blade with the blood of these zealots. But he knew his duty.

A flurry of well-executed sword-strokes hewed down the remaining attackers. Was it over? He nodded acknowledgement to the two dark-garbed men who fell in alongside him at the heart of their defence. Both wore the Sword and Dragon pins on their high-collared coats. These two were Elayne's _Asha'man_ Warders, their bond cementing the alliance between Andor and the Dark Tower. Two of Logain's strongest.

It was a hard thing to trust such men, but the Sword Prince knew better than most what the Warder bond did. They would die before they let any harm come to the Queen, just as he himself would. Taringail noted approvingly that both men had their swords out ready, and looked like they knew how to use them. The One Power was all very well. But a warrior needed to use every weapon at his disposal.

With a deafening thunder, the street ahead erupted in a column of earth and fire, cutting off the fleeing crowd, many of whom were engulfed in the conflagration. The explosions continued, driving the terrified people back upon their tightly-knit formation. The stampeding multitude clawed at the ranks of the Queensguard, desperate to seek shelter, and the warriors, despite their orders, were reluctant to slaughter their fellow citizens.

Taringail cursed impotently as he watched his forces' tightly-knit cohesion fall apart into chaos. He could see the design behind this attack. This was more than the inchoate anger of an anarchic band of madmen. This was organised. Premeditated.

Judging by the knowing looks the two _Asha'man_ were sharing, they could see the flows. Which made it the work of a man – or men – channelling _saidin._ Whoever they were, they were strong. The naked dread on the faces of the _Asha'man_ told its own tale.

With a seismic roar, the ground on either side of the route of march fountained, a chain of explosions, precise as an Illuminator's display but far more destructive in nature. The luckless citizenry that had thronged the route to see their Queen pass in state were obliterated, along with most of the Queensguard defenders. Yet even dying, their bodies shielded their Queen from the concussive force of the blast.

Taringail's ears rang, and he shook his head to clear his dazed mind. To make sense of what he was seeing. He couldn't hear a thing. A pall of rock dust and smoke limited visibility to a few dozen yards. There were broken bodies everywhere, injured people trying to crawl away with shattered limbs. _Blood and ashes!_

This phase of the attack had been precisely coordinated. Horrifying, appalling and ruthless in execution. Now they needed to respond. The _Asha'man_ and Elayne would have to serve as his eyes and ears. The channellers could see what he could not. He did his best to lip-read their conversation.

Elayne, yelling: (..You see anyone out there?..)

(..No. That wasn't channelling. Wards! Some bastard..)

Elayne again: (..Inverted webs? _Saidin_?..)

Taringail didn't catch what the _Asha'man_ replied, but their grim nods were sufficient. His mind raced. Clearly the aim of the attack hadn't been to incapacitate or kill the Queen. If that had been the attacker's intent, she would be dead already. That left only one possibility. _Thinning the herd._ The attacker or attackers wanted to isolate Elayne, most probably to abduct her.

 _Over my dead body!_ the Prince of the Sword resolved.

A dark, lean figure appeared out of the smoke, at first an insubstantial apparition that Taringail almost mistook for one of the injured, due to its dragging gait as it fastidiously picked its path through the wrack of broken bodies. Until the Prince saw the sword the figure carried, trailing languidly behind him, its tip dragging a serpentine channel through the dirt behind him, as if the long, slightly curved blade was a burden too heavy to bear.

Taringail caught the eye of the _Asha'man_. It was time to strike back.

" _Kill_ that whoreson!" he commanded, without hesitation.

The Prince of the Sword felt the two _Asha'man_ tense like hunting-hounds poised to spring. He couldn't see the flows they directed, but he could feel the air charged with wrath. Yet it was the two Warders that staggered as the dark stranger continued to stalk forward, unhurriedly, unchecked by their assault.

His features resolved out of the anonymity of the gloom, a cadaverous, dark-haired man with a face like winter. A chilly, contemptuous smile played upon his features. He was toying with the two _Asha'man._ Their conflict, invisible to the naked eye was all but done.

Taringail could see the strain upon the faces of the Warders, the resolve of outmatched men who were determined to die well. He wanted to scream to Elayne to link with them, but fear choked the words in his gullet. It was too late. Any distraction, any break in concentration would likely end the _Asha'man_ 's resistance.

What was the Queen doing? Her strength could surely turn the tide of this desperate battle! Taringail's gaze found her, and his heart fell. She too was fighting for her life, facing down a dark-haired woman, their wills locked as titanic forces strained between them.

Judging by the triumphant glint in her eye, the Queen was slowly prevailing, grinding down the resistance of the other woman. None of that would matter if the dark man prevailed against the Warders, and was free to fall upon her flank.

A crawling figure caught Taringail's eye. One of the Queensguard, her legs shattered beyond repair, inching her painful way towards Queen Elayne. The Prince of the Sword couldn't even identify her by sight. The woman's face was sheeted with blood. Dying, her first instinct was still to protect the Andoran sovereign.

The man in black saw her too. Helpless to prevent it, Taringail knew what was coming when he saw the man's sardonic smile. In a flowing, practiced motion, the dark man swept up his blade, before plunging it viciously downwards through the nape of her neck from above, extinguishing her life. She was dead before her body hit the ground.

Taringail might have thought it a battlefield mercy, had he not seen the callousness of his smile. Tears started in Taringail's eyes, running freely down his cheeks, registering an emotion that he couldn't feel, wrapped in the anonymous emptiness of the _ko'di._

Taringail levelled his sword, trying to attract the attention of the man with Death in his eyes. "Try my blade, Darkfriend" he snarled wrathfully. "Or do you only have the courage to slaughter innocents from ambush?"

Eyes as treacherous as the rime of ice on a winter lake met his, and for the first time in a dozen years, Taringail Mantear was afraid. A fear that splintered the Void, fissuring and spiderwebbing outwards like cracks in glass.

"Most assuredly" the man whose name was Death replied.

Before his heart failed him utterly, Taringail surged forward with a shout, falling upon Moridin with The Hawk Stoops on the Hare. The Forsaken spun into him with appalling swiftness, blunting his charge with The Cyclone Rages, the sword in his hand not one of steel, but a frozen icicle of black fire.

Having mastered his fear, the Andoran nobleman fought with a desperate ferocity, better than he had ever wielded the blade in his life, and their two swords rang together in a fountain of sparks, twice and thrice.

They were unequal partners in the dance, the short Andoran all bustle and industry, where the gaunt Forsaken was poise and grace, offsetting the younger man's honed fitness and sharpness with subtle artistry augmented with a wrist of iron.

Half-starved Moridin might be, but the sinewy Betrayer of Hope was twice the swordsman Taringail Mantear would ever be. Taringail took a rasping cut along the ribs which he barely felt in the immediacy of battle, responding automatically with The Courtier Taps His Fan, which his rangy opponent elegantly swayed aside from.

Rearing tall, Moridin swept his blade downwards in a cleaving stroke aimed at Taringail's head, and it was all the Prince of the Sword could do to desperately interpose his sword as the black blade fell with the stinging momentum of a blacksmith's hammer.

The blade of Fire met that of watered Andoran steel with a dolorous note as Taringail's sword snapped, leaving him clutching a jagged tooth of metal some six inches long from the tang of his weapon. The Andoran stared at his truncated blade in incomprehension as the sword of black fire clove into his chest.

The pain was appalling. Paralysing. But Taringail knew what he needed to do. Gritting his teeth against the enormity of the agony, he spitted himself upon the Forsaken's sword with the last of his remaining strength, lunging forward with the broken remnant of his sword, trying vainly to ram the jagged splinter of metal into Moridin's throat.

The Forsaken recoiled from Taringail's death-stroke, the fang of steel tracing an almost-imperceptible scratch on the side of his neck instead of plunging home in his jugular, and the Andoran finally fell.

* * *

With a wrench, Moridin pulled the sword from the breast of the dying man, rather than letting the blade of Fire melt away, in preparation for meeting any further assaults.

During the short duration of his duel with the red-haired nobleman, he had continued to prosecute his attacks upon the two _Asha'man_ with the Power, inexorably forcing shields of Spirit between the men and their connection with the One Power.

One of the pair had fallen unconscious from the shock of losing _saidin._ The other man, his eyes glazed with loss, was still standing. With a yell of rage, he ran at Moridin, sword swinging wildly.

The _Asha'man_ 's attack was wild, unfocused, lacking in conviction. Whatever his innate ability with the sword, it was clear to the Forsaken that losing the Power had shattered his confidence in his abilities. _Weak._

Moridin contemptuously batted aside a poorly-executed lunge, twisting his wrist in a vicious riposte that pollarded the Warder's arm at the elbow.

There was shock and denial in the _Gaidin's_ eyes as Hummingbird Kisses the Honeyrose surgically opened his throat. Moridin had seen it many, many times before. The bovine incomprehension of trivial men too limited even to accept the fundamental unimportance of their lives, lacking even the grace to properly acknowledge their death.

He spared the foppish Andoran a grudging nod of respect. He at least had been worthy of Moridin's blade. There had been understanding in his eyes, but no fear. Only resolution. That was how a _man_ died.

Moghedien's eyes were wide with fear, but she was still fighting doggedly with every scrap of her not inconsiderable abilities. It seemed to Moridin that the Andoran Queen was the stronger, however. Surrounded by the broken bodies of her household warriors, her back was straight and nothing in the set of her jaw evinced the slightest trace of fear.

So absorbed was Elayne with Moghedien, she did not hear Moridin as he stalked towards her, wraith-quiet. Only in the last instant did she become aware of his presence, wheeling upon him furiously in the moment he brought a mace of Air down firmly upon her head. She sagged into his arms, eyes rolling up in her head, and almost solicitously, he lowered her to the ground.

Moghedien collapsed onto her bended knees, strain and exhaustion hollowing her features, her chest heaving with exertion. She was spent. It was just as well he had intervened when he had. Another minute, and the Andoran queen would have prevailed. _Impressive._

Moridin looked down at the insensible Queen. His eyes widened with sudden recognition, and he almost lost the Source. That nagging sense of familiarity he had felt viewing her through Moghedien's lens of Air resolved itself, like the moment a person sees the real image hidden in an ink-blot picture.

Hers was a face he had never thought to see again if he lived to see the Wheel turn full circle a thousand times. A face his memory had caressed a hundred thousand times, like a picture kept in a wallet, creased and dog-eared with love – or at least, with obsession.

Seeing her like this hurt. In a way he hadn't believed he could be hurt anymore. Different from the searing ache which permeated his existence, the sight of her, alive once more in the world of flesh was a visceral blow, like a punch to the solar plexus.

 _Ilyena._


	38. Chapter 38: To Cleanse With Fire

**Chapter 38: To Cleanse with Fire**

 _Kill them both._

The thought arose unbidden in Moridin. Polished, lubricated and well-worn with use. A thing of metal, toothed wheels and gears, a mechanism that revolved. A spring that coiled. It was hard to arrest its motion.

 _Kill them._

The thought was a lure. A fishhook of the mind. Resisting it was hard. It grated. Like watching a stopped clock. Killing took so little effort. Felt so _right._ It was what he had been created for. Denying it, even for a moment, even in the service of a greater purpose, an agony. Pressure building.

It was the art of drowning. Falling into the depths, feeling the weight of the water pressing down, building with each fathom. The light above fading, retracting into a singularity, into infinity. The air in his lungs being compressed in the vise. The weight on his chest building, incrementally, inexorably. Blackness. Pressure. Silence.

The machine continued to turn, even with the hands of the clock stopped. Stripping its gears. Even steel would break when enough torque was applied.

 _Kill myself._

The apotheosis. An end, finally. The central dogma, the flywheel about which all the other thoughts revolved.

 _Break the machine._

The fabulous apparatus of consciousness, the means whereby meaning was elicited from the world. The Rohrsach pattern of blood upon snow transubstantiated into a screaming ideogram. Lews Therin cradling the broken body of Ilyena. The waveform of reality collapsing under observation. The Breaking, propagating through the sheaves of the Pattern at the speed of blight.

The _soma,_ the house of the world's spirit, a crippled dove with a mangled wing. He felt the minute tremblings of its body as he held it in his cupped hands. Watched it struggling vainly to fly. Felt life stream through his fingers like sand through an hourglass. His hands, sticky and warm. Stained with blood.

Moridin had held much back from Shaidar Haran, despite the torture he had endured at his hands. The Hand of the Dark hadn't known the right questions to ask. Of all the Chosen, Moridin had been trapped closest to the surface when Lews Therin and the Hundred Companions had Sealed the Bore, entombing the Forsaken as well as the Great Lord.

Ishamael had been caught like a fly falling into tree sap, struggling helpless as it set around him, a translucent amber. Close enough to the surface that he hadn't fallen into the dreamless sleep that the luckier Forsaken had experienced. Close enough to feel the excruciating, eroding entropic process by which the multiverse turned. _Entropy._ The means whereby the directionality of time was ordered.

Human beings had consciousness. However dimly, the ability to parse the raw data and infer meaning from it. Entropy affected information, just as surely as it affected physical quanta. Byte by byte, the universe forgot what was meant to be forgotten, until it was time to be born again. In the aggregate of their memories – intincted and coloured by their experiences – the data stream of the universe itself was encoded, the act of observation collapsing the waveform.

In a very real way, human consciousness was the mechanism whereby the universe was realised, discrete choice by discrete choice from the unrealised possibilities. As such, people were not created to endure the passage of too much time.

Depending on the nature of the observer, the conscious passage of time had different effects. In the case of Aginor, it was his corporeal body which had suffered, rotting and putrefying around him. For Ishamael, his nascent madness had metastasized. A consuming fire that had left him a husk, believing that he himself was _Shai'tan._

Very little had escaped the flames. Only his hatred for Lews Therin. He still didn't remember why. The moment where the love for his greatest friend had become hate. Even when he had died and been reborn as Moridin, those memories had not returned.

He remembered the despair that had caused him to forsake the Light. Looking back, he barely recognised the man he had been. The only constant was the pain. The granularity of his experience, the thing that differentiated him from everyone else. He was a fish, drowning in the air others breathed. How could they endure it?

 _Consciousness._

If he could not break the world, he could destroy the camera through which he observed it. An inescapable conclusion. A solution both practical and aesthetically-pleasing. If others were content to live in a corrupted heaven, let them. And since it was the singular act of his observation that found life unendurable, perhaps his death would even amend what was marred.

Hubris, perhaps, but not impossible. Madness, perhaps, but he had always intuited that he had always been intended for some greater purpose. The death of worlds. Perhaps the Great Lord thought so, too. He had been loath to grant Moridin the expression of final death. There had been a fear in _Shai'tan_ when he looked at Moridin. The same dread that he felt towards the Dragon.

Moridin had been curious to view the world where the Dark One had been defeated. To breathe its air. Curiosity. The brother of Hope. To see the handiwork of Rand al'Thor. A world from which _Caisen Hob_ had been banished. A logical paradox. Without Corruption, without Entropy – without the Dark One's touch – the universe would be frozen in time, a still image. Lifeless. It was this thought that Moridin had held back from Shaidar Haran.

 _Curiosity._

The Great Lord, consumed by his lust for possession, for mastery, had poured the essence of his being into the very matter, into the flesh of Moridin's world. A billion strings of black, between every fundamental particle in existence and the Dark One, a quantum entanglement that left every quark, photon and lepton thrumming with his malignity. The whole world, a Julia set, a viciously-barbed fractal, down to the raw edge where energy and matter were indistinguishable. A kingdom of Noise, of Discord. A monster.

Except for Moridin himself. His strength was great, forged in knowledge. Somehow, he had retained the integrity of his own being. Somehow, he had rejected the True Power. Vomited it out. _Shai'tan'_ s world had been a poison to him. His was a tiny, insignificant act of rebellion, the only vengeance he could take on the Dark One for breaking his word. For not allowing Moridin the release of final death. The Great Lord had always found Moridin an apt tool, recognising his talent for Death. Harnessing it to his own ends.

The other people in his world had become adjuncts to the Great Lord. All except Moridin. Small expressions of his malice, his cruelty. Autonomous only in their competition, their striving with each other. _Philosopher's zombies._ Herding, normative to each other and slaved to the Great Lord's design. Their free will an illusion.

They had all become so at the instant of the Great Lord's victory, the moment that the Dragon died. Even the most obdurate of the Lightfriends. Those had become some of the most terrible tyrants his world had ever known. Nynaeve the Compeller. al'Lan the Bloody-Handed. Aybara the Crusher, and many more. It seemed that the great saints and the great sinners were made from the same stuff. Sometimes, he wondered what he himself would have become, had he held to the Light.

A thought that filled him with weary disgust for the weakness it implied. There could be no going back. Denial of that simple truth was intellectual cowardice, as pitiful as the horrified denial he had felt when he had discovered the inevitability of the Great Lord's final victory. Feebleness he crushed in a grimy, blood-stained fist. Elan Morin had died. Drowned in a communion of blood. Elan had been too weak to cope with reality. Still less with his own part in the death of the World. Of all worlds.

 _Kill them both._

He looked down at where the two women lay. Ilyena was asleep, knees drawn up to her chest upon the cold ground. _No, not Ilyena_ , Moridin reminded himself. _Elayne._ This woman was no more Ilyena than he was Elan Morin. Hollowed out by the loss of her Warders, the golden-haired woman had quickly succumbed to dreamless sleep, her chest rising and falling shallowly. Moridin envied her.

 _Sleep. Without dreams._

Moghedien feigned sleep, her foetal posture mirroring that of the Trakand woman's. That was her real talent, the reason she had lived so long. The chameleon-like ability to blend in with her surroundings, to imitate others or to perform a simulacrum of physical tells that fitted the situation. Her needs.

Faced by superior strength, the nuances of Moghedien's body-language were designed to ensure she faded from notice, like a Grey Man. Emphasising the softness and delicacy of her female form. _Unthreatening. Weak._ Yet she was anything but. He could feel her insidious presence, a soft pressure inside his head like a tapeworm, mimicking its background, trying to pass herself off as part of him. Part of his own mind. She stiffened as she felt the searchlight of Moridin's regard pass over her, fleeing back into herself.

At first, she had attempted to use the Warder bond overtly to command him. When that had failed, and he had numbed the link the bond created, she began trying to fumble her way into his head, at first clumsily, like a child trying to wedge her hand into a cookie jar, then with increasing sophistication. It was in her nature. She couldn't help herself.

 _Kill her._

Moridin grinned humourlessly. _Maybe later._

 _Maybe later._

His gaze returned to Ilyena. _Elayne._

Ilyena had been his greatest friend, since childhood. A friendship lasting hundreds of years. Whatever others had thought, what Elan felt – had felt – for her was platonic. Another irony in a life of so many, that the great love of his life had been sexless. A lifeless statue of pallid marble.

Ilyena Sunhair had been beautiful, with the translucent beauty of a great piece of algebra, a Commutative Rings theory, an incorruptible symmetry that was always revealing itself to the observer, and Elan Morin had adored her with an unquestioning simplicity, as if she had been the Light made flesh. An expression of all that was – had been – transcendent in the world.

As he had fallen into despair, it was she alone that had held him to the Light. Faith. The trust a mathematician has, fumbling through a proof, that the mathematics will hold true, be consistent. _Congruous._ That the darkness will yield to the light, to a greater appreciation of beauty, Chaos resolving into Order.

 _Harmony._

Ilyena had been a lifeline when all the others had given up on him, even after he and Lews Therin had...

...(had _what_?)

.. drifted apart. She had met his nihilism with her characteristic gentle kindness, the graveness of her concern inlimned in her brown eyes. It hadn't been enough to save him.

Elan Morin had been a good man, in human terms. Transparent, like a rough-hewn piece of rose quartz. It took faith to look clear-eyed into the depths of your own heart, seeing the striations, the tiny imperfection, the flaws marring the Creator's workmanship, and still call His creation good.

Elan Morin had always been honest. _Accountable._ Now those cracks were multiplying, spiderwebbing into fissures as a good man became bad, the process irresistible, deterministic. Even a diamond would fracture under a hard-enough blow. Chaos hadn't resolved into order. It had run rampant.

He had tried to explain his .. moral degredation .. to Ilyena. She hadn't understood. For all her acuity, perhaps she was simply incapable of it. And Moridin had looked into her fabulous, liquid eyes. A feverish idea took hold of him. Ilyena, at the least, had to be preserved from the inevitability of corruption. Not simply those expressed through the ravages of old age. Ilyena wasn't perfect, but she was as close to the ideal as fallen humanity was capable of. Such an example needed to be preserved.

And so he had began a great work, in secret. A nullentropy capsule that would forever seal Ilyena Sunhair in stasis, suspended animation, vibrating at the fundamental frequency of the universe. For her unblinking eyes, a Planck second would pass, regardless of the time she was suspended. She would neither age, nor die, nor be seduced into evil.

With his work completed, he had rushed to her side her, hoping he was not too late.

Ilyena had heard him out with incomprehension, then dawning horror.

"It would be a living death" she had replied. There had been no love in her eyes in that moment. Only revulsion, and fear. Fear of him. In that moment, Elan had been sure that the Dark One's clutches had seized Ilyena's pure heart. Snatched the last ray of light from the world. From his despairing eyes.

The Light had gone. But it could be avenged.

He had seized _saidin_ in his wrath, determined to destroy this impostor, who dared to wear Ilyena's face and form. They had fought with the Power. A grim struggle. Ilyena was strong in the Power, and desperate to live. She had held him off. Long enough for others to come to her aid. He had fled.

That night, alone, Elan Morin found the Void. The novitiate exercises which he had once performed unthinkingly, now a litany that comforted him. The Flame, and the Void. He concentrated on the Flame. Visualising it as bright-hot and concentrated as a welder's arc.

Piece by piece, he took his hopes, his dreams and his loves and fed them into the annihilating, purifying white heart of the Flame he envisaged, until there was nothing left. No vestigial remnant of the man Elan Morin. Not even ashes.

Fire sterilised. It cleansed, where nothing else would.

It gave him a purpose. A calling.

He had a world to burn.


	39. Chapter 39: Gai'shain

**Chapter 39: Gai'shain**

The Seven Towers of Malkier – for so long and so many miles an exclamation mark seen from afar – now dominated the horizon.

The needle-nosed towers – some broken apart during some long-forgotten battle to reveal their innards – reminded the Aiel of the termite mounds found in the Waste. Of wasp's nests, constructed from paper patiently masticated from tree bark and saliva.

The product of an alien intelligence, ordered to an aesthetic he didn't understand. A burrowing, cankering organisation that engendered a feeling of disquiet, even nausea despite – or perhaps because of – the mathematical symmetry inherent in the structure. A tryphophobic nightmare of nested holes, to Muradin's sensibilities – the visual analogue of the scrape of a dull knife on unglazed ceramic. Black and pitted, the Malkier capital frowned over the fissured land.

 _Why would people choose to live in such a place?_ Muradin had no answer. Wetlanders were strange. Barely human, in so many ways.

He had been running for three days and three nights, with very little sleep. Water had been plentiful – this was the Wetlands, after all – and Wetland game easy to hunt, made complacent by the luxurious denseness of the foliage afforded them for cover.

Muradin smiled reminiscently. There was a Wetland animal called a rabbit, with long and delicate ears like velvet, and a sensitive and characterful face. There had been nothing like these in the Three-Fold Land! Only sinewy mice and rats which made poor forage.

Rabbit meat was fat-sweet, water-fed. Succulent. He'd allowed himself the indulgence of a fire, the night before last, cooking the coney over the embers, salivating as drips of fat sizzled into the fire while he waited for his meal to cook. Broke apart the flavoursome meat with his fingers and teeth, hands oily with the fragrant grease.

Good eating. Wetland cuisine – beef, pork and lamb cooked slow the Seanchan way, with peppers and spices – had never suited his taste, the flavours somehow artificial. Stilted. But this – this was real food, brought down by his bow. Food he had worked for.

He'd taken the pelt too, eyeing the fur appraisingly. The rabbit had been in his winter coat. A layered quilt that Muradin had inspected with interest – long outer hairs with a surprisingly rough texture interspersed with barbed guard hairs to seal in pockets of air for insulation, and an inner layer of downy fluff.

The snowy white of the pelt had not been lost upon the Shaido warrior, either. Borderland winters were severe, with the potential for heavy snow. If he was to spend much time in these lands, it would serve him to amend his _cadin'sor_ to match the foreign colours and textures. This rabbit skin would make a fine cap to augment his clothing.

Muradin ran steadily, his breath steaming in the cold air. Disconcerting, for an Aiel, to see such tangible proof of his body's water being expelled so needlessly. The ache of his muscles was a constant reminder of the miles behind him.

The Shaido was close to the end of his reserves of energy, which informed him that he had judged his effort nicely. He'd pushed himself as hard as he had dared – and not a hair more. The necessity of his task demanded it. Even with sufficient water and food, a man could not run indefinitely. He needed shade, and sleep. Whilst he did not have the furnace heat of the Aiel Waste to contend with, he had its polar opposite. Cold.

This was not – yet – the fury of winter's heart, the kind of extreme weather that was a clear and present danger – driving winds and snow and the white-blindness. An acknowledged threat – a white-eyed adversary, with his face veiled and spears in his hand.

This chill was dangerous in a different way because it crept up on you unawares. Patient. Like a snow leopard stalking. The kind of cold that numbed your extremities and worked inwards. That you ignored, through machismo, to your peril, as you wrapped rags around your fingers and pinked them agonisingly to keep them working, to keep the blood flowing.

It was a million splinters of ice, gnawing away at muscle and will alike. It stole a man's resolve – crumb by crumb. Made him querulous. Self-pitying. A wise man walked the knife-edge, acknowledging the discomfort, his weakness, even his longing for the comfort of food, fire and sleep, and yet denying himself their succour, knowingly, and without self-pity. Muradin knew these things. He was not a young man. And yet it was hard.

Malkier was barren, but in a different way to the Three-Fold Land. A land of clay, like the surface of an unglazed pot. Firm under his feet. Hard on the legs. He'd passed by the occasional sign of life. A watchtower. A few acres of turned soil. A small hamlet, a clutch of houses comforting together, surrounded by a trench and a levee of earth. Muradin had given these settlements a wide berth.

Except once, by curiosity, when drawn by the ringing of iron upon iron, he'd investigated a larger, solitary dwelling with a tall chimney-stack belching smoke. He would not have turned aside for mere curiosity, but the place was in his path. It was a few hours after dawn. He was hungry. Nearly starving, in truth. Malkier was as devoid of game as the deep desert of the Waste.

He'd shown himself when he saw the dweller was a blacksmith. The smith was frowning with deep concentration as he hammered at a shank of metal, which glowed a dull, secret red. He hadn't heard Muradin approach. Not wishing to shame the man, the Aiel coughed, shuffling his feet in the dirt so that the blacksmith would be aware of his presence.

The smith turned around. A big fellow with a balding pate, brawny arms bare above his leather gauntlets pockmarked with the marks of errant sparks. Muradin noticed with interest a long, puckered weal running along his upper arm. A spear-wound, unless he missed his guess.

Muradin watched his eyes, saw a flash of alarm and recognition quickly masked by wary caution. He gave the Aiel a cautious nod. Muradin waited.

With great care, the blacksmith laid down his hammer and tongs, leaving the blade on the anvil. _A sickle-blade? Or perhaps a sword?_ Life? Or Death? It was too early to tell.

The silence dragged. A pause that would have been considered rude among his people. Muradin considered the likelihood of a deliberate insult. Set the feeling of irritation aside with conscious deliberation. A weapon laid down. A spear that yearned to take flight.

"I see you, Blacksmith" Muradin spoke instead, clasping his left fist and thumping his chest twice in the traditional greeting. "May you find water and shade."

The smith had been hesitant. "I see you, Aiel." he said in a low, resonant voice. He frowned again, brows beetling thunderously, as if thinking hard, before returning Muradin's fist-to-chest salute awkwardly. _Ignorance, then, not insult,_ Muradin's internal dialogue concluded. "Meaning no offense," the man continued, steadily, his eyes returning to the comforting weight of the forge hammer he'd laid down, "but do you intend to do me harm?"

Muradin coloured to the roots of his hair. "Burn me! No! No Aiel would seek to harm a blacksmith!" _Well, not unless he tried to kill me first._ Words better left unsaid. Some words were weapons, too.

The smith sighed. "Well, that's a bloody relief. I'm getting on a bit for fighting a battle. I lost my taste for it – what little I ever had – in the Blood Snow."

Muradin nodded. "We're neither of us as young as we once were." he commented.

The blacksmith shrugged apologetically, shuffling his feet. "I reckon I'm after forgetting my manners. Would you care to warm yourself by the fire? I was just finishing a blade for a harrow before making myself some breakfast. You're welcome to join me."

The Aiel smiled with rare warmth. "A handsome apology and a fine offer. It would be my honour" he responded.

Breakfast had been a fitch of smoked bacon and a half-dozen hen's eggs, fried over the coals on the back of a shovel. Muradin gulped it down, relishing the unfamiliar crisped textures of the fried eggs, their runny yolks melting upon the tongue.

The meal was chased down with tea, served black, piping-hot and steaming, leavened with a dollop of honey. Strong, stewed, he could feel the warmth of it chasing the cold from his bones. They found the companionability of veteran spear-brothers, an easy silence, neither wishing to relive past conflict, but drawing familiarity from the knowledge of it.

"Good, eh?" the smith asked, gesturing at the remnants of the meal. "Of course, I have to trade for most of it, and pay a pretty penny for the tea. Most folk here live on what they grow, but I got a taste for the stuff. Meat, too – there's not enough grass for cattle or pigs as yet, but man does not live by bread alone. Or so the Good Book tells me. But work's good, I'm always busy, and I've got enough for the little luxuries."

They had parted ways amiably. Muradin had given the blacksmith – his name was Aylan – a stoppered flask of _oosquai_ as guest-gift. It shamed him a little to provide so poor a gift after such a fulsome breakfast, but he carried little beside his weapons and water. Aylan's eyes had lit up however, delighted by the gift. "I've always wanted to try _oosquai._ I do love me some hard liquor. Tell me, Muradin, what is it made from?" as he unstoppered the vial and began to raise it to his lips.

Muradin made a see-sawing gesture with his hand. "A little of this, a little of that.. A lizard's gall-stones. The testicles of a wild goat. ..."

Aylan's hand froze with the vessel half way to his mouth, his eyes wearing a glassy expression. "Truly?.." the blacksmith had asked him, his disappointment writ large upon his face."

It had been a comical expression, Muradin thought wryly. Like a thirsty man realising a desert oasis up ahead was only a tantalising mirage. Hard to keep a straight face. He clapped Aylan upon the shoulder. "Not really. I was just having you on. Aiel humour. Light, man, you should have seen your face!"

"You crook-horned goat" Aylan laughed, delighted. "I always was a credulous man. So, what is it really?"

"Corn brandy. Triple-distilled." Muradin told him.

Aylan took a deep draught, and wiped his beard absently with the back of his hand. "Strong enough to clean my bellows-pipes" he commented mildly. "But damn good. You Aiel never do anything by halves."

Aylan had given him directions to the Aiel encampment, which it turned out lay not far from the Seven Towers. Aylan had not been there, himself, but others from a neighbouring hamlet had. "You have friends there? Kin?" the blacksmith had asked.

"Neither" Muradin told him.

Aylan looked meaningfully at Muradin's bow and spears, propped up against the wall, away from the warping heat of the forge fire. "Men you mean to kill?"

"Not if I can help it" Muradin replied, honestly. "They may have blood-feud with my clan, but I have come here to aid them, if I can. If they will let me."

"Good." Aylan said gruffly. "Light, but this world has seen enough killing. Peace favour your spear, Muradin of the Shaido Aiel."

"Peace favour your hammer, Aylan the Blacksmith, of the clan of Malkier. And the Light be with you."

* * *

Muradin looked down from the slope of a long ridge overlooking the Taardad hold in Malkier. It would be foolishness to approach any closer without giving warning. The kind of foolishness that earned an arrow or a spear through the body. He didn't fear waking from the dream, but not with his mission unfulfilled.

He stood, profiled against the sky, in full view, like the figure of sticks and rags Aiel children set up on a hilltop as the 'clan chief' to watch over them whilst they played at dancing the spears.

Aiel children always wanted to be the clan chief – until they realised that the chief customarily did not venture his own person in battle, but directed the dance from afar. So the children built the effigy – the symbolic figure, exposed and visible, moved only by the vagaries of the wind – and ignored it to dance as they would.

How Muradin's life had turned around, come full circle. To once more become as guileless as a child. Every instinct screamed at him to remove himself from the hilltop, to stop presenting such a tempting target to a whole clan of his hereditary enemies. Instead, he raised his voice in a great shout, scraping his throat raw.

"I am Muradin! Of the Domai sept of the Shaido Aiel! Son of Muradin, and nephew of Couladin, who in his pride and folly falsely claimed to be the _Car'a'carn_ – to the destruction of my clan and the wounding of the Aiel nation! I have a message for the Taardad clan, and the whole Aiel nation. I beg of you only this, hear me out! Then do with me what you will!"

His words were like arrows, speeding to their targets, finding the ears of countless unseen watchers. Muradin could not see them, their tradecraft was equal to or better than his own, but he could feel the eyes on his back. Fearing that they would take his life before he got to deliver his message, he continued his harangue.

"The Seanchan and the Sharans have joined together to make a great war upon the Aiel. They intend to fall upon you everywhere at once, through Gateways, in a coordinated assault.

For years, the Sharans have been sending spies amongst you, disguised as peddlers, to all the holds in the Three-Fold Land and here in Malkier. Men and women who can channel, learning the ground for Travelling. They have the capability and the strength in arms. You have a matter of days to prepare – if that – and make ready for war. They come! I beg you. Warn the clans!"

Silence. Muradin paused. He had never been a fiery speaker, like his uncle or father. Just a warrior. Then a traveller. Was the right message in him? A Shaido, a man long separated from his people by blood-guilt and his restless wandering among the nations. Who was he to speak about what it was to be an Aiel? He _needed_ to find the right words.

"Whatever Couladin, or my father, or Sevanna of accursed memory believed, _we are one people_. I ask only this. Warn my clan, too, with the others. Give the Shaido – scattered and dispersed as we are – the same chance to resist the invader as the others. After, do with me what you will. If my blood can provide some measure of expiation, some small _toh_ paid towards the infamy of my kin, I will gladly pay it."

From behind a boulder, a pair of Aiel spear-brothers emerged. Muradin blinked. He would have sworn there wasn't space for a single warrior there, let alone a pair. Twenty yards away, and he hadn't spotted them. They looked hard. Competent. The _cadin'sor_ the pair wore was baffled in the nondescript hues of the Malkier deadlands. Of more pressing import, both were veiled, and two arrows were pointed unwaveringly at his chest.

"Jherric can take a sparrow on the wing at a hundred paces" one of them informed him tonelessly. "Sparrows are good eating. I suggest you don't move a muscle, Shaido."

Other figures unearthed themselves from the scree slope, where they had lain hidden. Men and Maidens, fanning out into a rough semicircle closing in upon where he stood.

There were nine of them. Eight were coldly sizing him up, with the dispassion of hunters eyeing a quarry. They were veiled. The ninth was taller, and unveiled. His face florid, angry, jaw jutting out like a clenched fist. Hand hovering threateningly by his beltknife. A youth, with something to prove, and therefore by definition, dangerous. It was this one that spoke. Not the alpha of the pack, but a younger male, snapping for attention, posturing.

"We're not interested in the lies you're peddling, Shaido dog!" he snarled. He overtopped Muradin by a half-pace and the discrepancy in size made him bold, as he stepped forward, looming over the older man. "Tell us where your skulking friends are hiding, and maybe, _maybe,_ we'll give you a clean death!"

 _Couladin._ That was who this young idiot reminded Muradin of. He felt his rein over his own temper slip fractionally. But his anger was cold. "So far as I know" he responded icily, speaking to the man who had first addressed him and ignoring the hothead. "I am the only Shaido within a hundred wheels. I came alone. From Ebou Dar."

Evidently, the firebrand didn't take well to being passed over. He levelled a spear at Muradin's midriff threateningly. "You don't get to ignore me, old man..." he began, truculently.

 _Arrogant child._ There were at least half a dozen ways Muradin saw to injure, kill or incapacitate the angry young man.

Pride. Coursing through Muradin's veins like fire. He could feel himself losing control...

Instead, he sidestepped quickly. The youth tracked his sudden movement with the spear-point – as Muradin stopped, allowing the sharpened blade of the tall youth's spear to scratch his upper arm, drawing blood.

"He struck me!" Muradin yelled. "I must have _toh!_ "

A thin ripple of amused laughter rose from the other eight warriors. Muradin had engineered the situation, and his adversary's clumsiness, and the brash young man had no alternative but to take Muradin _gai'shain._ Wearing an ironical grin, Muradin placed his hands behind his head.

The hothead was incensed. " _Fight_ me!" he demanded, spittle spraying the Shaido's cheek.

"The _gai'shain_ cannot" Muradin responded meekly, lowering his eyes. But the shadow of a smile chased his features. "Perhaps you can ask this one again – in a year and a day!" he added.

Belly-laughs from the other Taardad warriors. They evidently enjoyed the young warrior's discomfiture. Muradin was elated. Come what may, the tale would spread, and with it, his message. And if it saved the life of a single Aiel, it would be worth it.

Muradin was still smiling as the tall youth expended his frustration in a hard right hand, driven full-force into Muradin's solar plexus. He folded up around the blow.

The young man bent his arm behind his back in a vicious hold to secure him, throwing him onto his stomach as he cut Muradin's clothes off his body with his belt knife. Then he broke Muradin's bow and spears in front of him, taking his belt-knives and throwing them away down the shale slope like rubbish. Lastly, he tied Muradin's wrists together behind his back with a thong of leather.

A shadow fell over him as he lay there in the dirt.

It was one of the other Taardad warriors, a fire-haired man, who dragged him to his feet.

"Fear not" he told Muradin in low tones. "We will take your message to the Wise Ones, and to the chiefs."

"And will they listen?" Muradin asked, in an agony of expectation and fear.

"Perhaps. My mother is Aviendha, a Wise One of the Nine Valleys sept."


	40. Chapter 40: What Will Be

**Chapter 40: What Will Be**

"We sought to change the future" Amys declared, her voice sharp. Peremptory. "Perhaps it is a living thing that does not readily suffer our attempts to amend what must be." The Wise One shrugged her thin shoulders, disturbing the fall of her waist-long white hair, before turning her attention back to the cup of tea in her hand, for all the world as if she was talking about a matter of no greater import than the weather.

The sweat tent was full. Not all the Wise Ones were here, of course. There was, however, a quora representing the more senior Wise Ones in attendance, numbering every major clan, excepting the Shaido.

There was no formalised 'pecking order' among Wise Ones, ostensibly, not one determined by strength in the Power, or age, or worse, social cachet. They frowned at such goings-on amongst the Aes Sedai and the Kin. No, amongst the Wise Ones, it was simply a matter of respect governing who deferred to whom. A respect afforded by long association.

Aviendha was the youngest woman there by a couple of decades. There had been other Wise Ones raised from Apprentices in her generation, but none had seen fit to attend here. Had one of these peers in age chosen to do so, for such an important occasion, it would have raised a few eyebrows for sure, but wouldn't have occasioned any sort of discipline or formal censure. One simply didn't tell a Wise One where she could and couldn't be. Not even another Wise One. In theory.

Still, Wise One were still women, if putatively sapient, and there were a hundred subtle ways of indicating to one of these keener and less-experienced Wise Ones that their zeal might be more productively employed in any one of the many worthwhile tasks that were the day-to-day lot of every Wise Woman. Training apprentices. Healing injuries. Assisting women in labour. ...

Aviendha was still surprised to find herself numbered amongst the senior Wise Ones, even after more than a decade. She feared it had fallen to her because she was the widow of the _Car'a'carn_ and because she had distinguished herself at the Last Battle, even becoming famous for her fight with Graendal. Really!

She had just done her duty, like everybody else. Any Wise One – any Maiden – would likewise have tried to plant a spear in that vicious old crone, and been glad of the chance to rid the world of a creature so steeped in blood. Why should she be celebrated simply because she had sufficient strength – barely – to scrap the old hag to a draw, instead of waking from the dream?

Aviendha looked around, the comfortable darkness under the goatskin obscuring the faces and form of all but the women in closest proximity as they sat cross-legged on mats to talk. The brazier was full – sea-coal instead of wood in treeless Malkier – and intermittantly, white-robed _gai'shain_ with water pitchers splashed the coals to create a dense fug of steam that permeated the room.

Many of the women present here had come in haste by Gateway to attend this meeting from holds all across the Three-Fold Land. Some from further afield – Aiel embassies to the White and Black Towers, and from peace-keeping secondments in trouble hotspots like Tarabon and Murandy, where they rubbed shoulders with White Ajah diplomats and _Asha'man_ ambassadors, not to mention Wavemistresses of the _Atha'an Miere._

The world had grown smaller, a spider's nest of interconnected strings, and the Aiel – due to their unique position of trust as guardians of the Dragon's Peace – were like the _moghedien,_ straddling the web, feeling the aftershocks of events and ideas, the interplay of diplomacy and commerce as it happened.

Rather than making them soft, their role had kept Aiel spears keen. _Iron sharpens iron._ And the Wetlands and Seanchan had taught the Aiel that _Daes Dae'mar_ and economics were just as important a theatre of conflict as the dance of spears. A reality the Dragon Reborn had not been fully cognizant of. It was a different world, now.

The silence was pressing upon Aviendha, as she belatedly realised the others were waiting for her to speak. To counter Amys, perhaps. It was perhaps unsurprising. After all it had been her visions in the glass _ter'angreal_ of Rhuidean that were at the heart of things. That and the dog's dinner presented to them all by Muradin, son of Muradin. A Shaido. But an honest one, it seemed. The Wise Ones had ways and means of establishing veracity using the One Power. Nothing coercive or intrusive was required.

For her, she had known the truth when she had looked in his eyes. He was a man scared honest. More, he seemed to be a righteous man. A humble Shaido – if such a thing could be believed. A deep man, slow to speak. In all honesty, all the Wise Ones present detested the Shaido. It seemed that the Shadow had poisoned the well when it came to that clan. A work wrought in the darkness seemingly over generations that found fruition in Couladin and Sevanna. Arrows in the quiver of the Forsaken, Asmodean. And yet, without exception, the Wise Ones were of one mind when it came to Muradin's testimony.

It was true. And the implications were terrifying.

They had sent him away, then. What was to follow was women's work.

Aviendha cleared her throat. She knew what she had to say.

"It may be so" Aviendha replied, carefully, her words directed to the circle of seated Wise Ones as much as to Amys herself. "What is has been and will come again. Who can say? The Pattern chose to reveal a portion of itself to us, through the glass _ter'angreal_. Visions of the future – a possible future – in reverse order, each following the other inexorably, like the fall of dominoes, one after the other in sequence. A chain of events, leading to the utter destruction and eradication of the Aiel people – defeated in battle by the Seanchan, made faithless and ultimately worthless by our actions and the erosion of our culture, leading inevitably to our extermination down to the last man, woman and child. Why show us such a thing, if we were powerless to arrest it?

We sought to change that future by writing ourselves into the Dragon's Peace, to safeguard my husband's legacy to the Aiel and to serve the Wetland nations as his spears of peace. I spent much of the short time I had with the shade of my heart trying to persuade Rand al'Thor to commit himself – body, heart and soul – to the Aiel, to renounce what I saw, in the impetuous arrogance of my youth, as the corrupting weakness of the Wetland culture he grew up in."

Aviendha laughed dryly, and shook her head sadly. "I saw it as a choice. Love the Aiel, or love the wetlanders. Such a foolish girl was I. My hair should have remained in braids! He would never settle for anything less than loving, living for – and ultimately, dying for – both. He was _Car'a'carn,_ and he was the Dragon Reborn, and he ultimately chose to sacrifice every jot and tittle of himself that was his own to give – everything that was not _ji_ and _toh_ – to that purpose. His greatness was that he found no contradiction in it."

Aviendha took a calming swallow of her tea, before setting the cup down decisively. She needed her mind clear for what was to follow. "We need a consensus, here, amongst us who lead – we Wise Ones. If what the Shaido says is true, war has come upon us, whether we chose it or not. At such short notice, it might be possible to put the holds on notice, and begin the evacuation of all those who cannot fight, But to buy them time, we who can – the _algai'd'siswai_ and yes, even we Wise Ones – must stay and fight to buy time for the others. We _must_. If we don't, we all die. It is that simple.

Perhaps some of you may find comfort in the thought that this is not the same situation that I foresaw in my vision. In the dream, the Seanchan were provoked by our warriors. Furthermore, they saw us as a viable target because we were not included in the Dragon's Peace, and strong as we are, we stood alone.

Instead, they find us the arbiters of peace, even-handed dispensers of justice among all nations – excepting only Shara. The Dragon's Peace requires the Wetland nations to aid us against any aggressor. We will not stand alone. Malker – at the very least – will be true.

We aren't making the same mistake that was foretold in my vision. It is a different situation. Our aggressors are weaker, individually, and their association is riven with the mistrust of the treacherous. If we can withstand their first incursion, we can hurt them so badly they never think of testing Aiel spears again. They are like a leopard cub trying to make a meal of a porcupine. We will bloody their nose, inflicting wounds that will fester and not heal, and they will slink away in shame."

Sorilea's astringent voice cut over the hubbub. "I say we _fight._ " She emphasised her words by slapping the low wooden table with the flat of a callused hand, sending her tea, tray and all, careening off it.

The ancient Wise One paid it no mind. Neither did any of the others, captivated by the clean anger in the formidable old woman. The kind of fight-till-you drop fury of a mother defending her child. "And when I say _fight,_ twenty thousand Chareen Aiel lace on their bucklers, and sharpen their spears!" Sorilea continued, the intensity of her gimlet gaze at the end leavened with scratchy humour, like _segade_ spines. " _If_ you women agree with my point of view, of course!"

 _A question, if not explicitly stated as such_ , Aviendha mused. But then again, it wasn't. Just as well then that the domineering old woman was, in this instance, absolutely right. Still, their eyes clashed, striking sparks.

It was on account of what Shaiel had done, Aviendha knew all too well. Sorilea had demanded that Shaiel be named _da'tsang._ Aviendha and all of the other Wise Ones had voted against it. Shaiel was young – clearly hadn't known what she had done. A thing that was thought impossible. And yet. And yet...

In a different future, Shaiel at the same age had been a leader of her people. A Wise One. In that vision, Shaiel had borne a different name, a name that Aviendha had never dared to speak aloud. _Padra._ A small change, but a significant one, showing the future was not set in stone. It had been Padra that the clan chief, Ronam, son of Rhuarc, had turned to – and not Aviendha – when the fateful decision to go to war with the Raven Empire had been made. Where was Aviendha in that future?

 _Dead._

Somehow, Aviendha knew it. And instead of being a decisive Wise One, because she was still alive to lead, her daughter Shaiel was instead a moody, sullen teenage Maiden. Self-obsessed. Woefully unprepared for what was coming. _Much as she herself had been at the same age,_ Aviendha changing the future somehow made things _worse?_

Unknowable.

Aviendha could feel the Pattern mocking her. Time was like a Wetland river, slow-moving but inexorable. You could dam it for a time, try and arrest or change its course, but it was resistant to change, ever trying to find its way back into the channel it had dug into the earth.

Despite her own words to the contrary, the similarity of the events with those foretold in her vision were disturbing. Aviendha's testimony was given to allay the fears of others. Those who had not intimately lived those echoes of past lives as she herself had. For herself, there was only anxiety at the magnitude of what lay before them all. Still, she could only see one course of action. Which meant that the important decision that determined their fate likely was already behind them.

That thought was either the source of greatest comfort. Or unending horror, depending upon how one interpreted events.

* * *

Across the tent, Hessalam smiled appreciatively through the Mask of Mirrors she was wearing. The inverted weave was tied-off, and to the other women in the sweat-tent, she seemed to be another person. A woman called Hagal, a Jindo Aiel. The real Hagal was ashes in the wind, her body burned by Fire. Another inverted weave. Aiel were observant. It paid to be cautious.

Hessalam's last attempt at concealing herself amongst the Aiel had ended in abject failure, humiliating discovery and flight, but she had profited much from its lessons, interrogating the woman she had replaced thoroughly under heavy Compulsion to learn as much as she could about her. Her routines, friends, chores – everything Hessalam could think of that might be of use. Her facsimile would have to be near-perfect to avoid detection.

Hessalam had learned as much as she could about Aiel culture over the months and years, though most of it at second-hand, with the diligence Karamile Maradim Nindar had once devoted to her psychological studies. A burden made light by love. It had all been worth it. The object of her desire sat not twenty feet from her. Almost close enough to touch... _No. Not yet. Soon. But not yet._

Hessalam had heard her speech, the declamation of an angel of light. The words didn't matter. Neither did the message. _Honour. Duty. War._ She had heard it all before. From kings and prophets, agitators and bureaucrats. Even from the Dragon, Lews Therin. The vomit of words, reused, regurgitated.

What mattered was _her_. Aviendha. The effect she had. The spell she wove with her voice, the way they hung on her every word. These rancid old women squatting in the dirt in a pen that smelt of goat piss, whilst they stewed like prunes in their own juices! But that was of no import. Aviendha's conviction carried them, swayed them – even her enemies. Hessalam had been long in the game, and the foul looks that Sorilea was giving Aviendha indicated an abiding antipathy.

More important was the revelation. For now, Hessalam understood something more about her Beloved. Something that changed everything profoundly. Aviendha's identity, her sense of self, couldn't be seperated from her relationship to her people.

 _Hah, that made sense_ , the analytical side of Hessalam's brain informed her, resurrecting half-remembered sociological datum and studies about identity and relationship in tribal cultures which putatively corroborated her flash of intuition.

Great art had the opposite methodology to great science, Graendal reflected. In the sciences, one was always trying to seperate the observer and the observed. Of course, it seemed that in practice, observation affected the outcome of the experiment. An outcome of numinous awe to a physicist, but not to a sculptor, who experiences the work-hardening of his hands as he wields the chisel. Feeling his art work on him just as he worked on it, the vision for his masterpiece changing as the labour progressed.

It was a two-way street. Your creation was as real as you were. Life was animate. You got your hands dirty. Rolled up your sleeves. You couldn't just watch. At least, not if you had _commitment_.

Hessalam had commitment.

It wasn't enough to merely reshape Aviendha. To prune her into Hessalam's desired perfection and form. To do so would be leaving the work unfinished. Incomplete. She must also reshape how Aviendha related to her backwards, primitive society.

And finally, of course, through Aviendha, Hessalam would transfigure the Aiel in her image. A perfect, flawless work of art.

Hessalam had discovered her calling.


	41. Chapter 41: Prepared Ground

**Chapter 41: Prepared Ground**

Shaiel was conscious of the sweat sticking her _cadin'sor_ to her back, although it was chill. Her elevated heart-rate. Symptoms of stress, compartmentalised. It was this place. Her hunter's instincts, assessing the terrain, correctly assessed her position as vulnerable.

This was prepared ground. A place where other hunters had laid their snares. Where they lay in wait in the shadows with bow and spear. A place of watch and ward.

Long die-straight corridors of bare white stone, cut and shaped, narrow, stripped bare of clutter to afford uninterrupted vantage for the defenders, lighted torches set in alcoves in the walls, carefully staged to ensure that the cones of light intersected, overlapping, leaving no pockets of shadow from which a Fade could twist into being. Murder holes in the low ceiling, through which hot sand and worse could be poured upon an attacker. This was a place of war, more than it was a hold. The fortress of the iron kings of Malkier, the Seven Towers.

Shaiel stalked between two Malkieri guards, in their carapace of barded steel, topped with carburised iron helms that completely covered the wearer's face, save from narrow eyeslits, and small holes for breathing. Flat gazes had assessed her, as with quiet courtesy, they bade her give up her weapons – her prized bow and spears.

Eyes that missed little. She had tried to withhold a dagger concealed in her boot – force of habit. These men merely waited, as if they had nothing but time, without comment, until Shaiel with a chagrined cough produced the offending weapon, slapping it down hilt first into a gauntleted palm with ill-concealed embarrassment.

"I'll be wanting those back" she informed the guard, with a sniff and a toss of her head. "I had better find them undamaged when I return for them."

"As you say, Mistress Shaiel" the man replied. Had there been a flicker of cool amusement in his voice? "Upon my honour." More than a flicker, this time, for all the Borderland veneer of formality!

They were within the inner keep now – the Seven Towers that gave the Malkier capital its name. The seven towers were a hexagon made of hexagons – six towers surrounding and shouldering the weight of a central spire that climbed more than a mile above the city.

The towers themselves were conical – circles within hexagons – comprising an inner and outer shell of stone that buttressed each other, lofting the colossal mass of stone overhead. Black marble on the outside, cool white limestone on the inside – Ogier-wrought, sealed with the One Power. Lightweight and strong, like the shell of an egg.

Flares of stonework connected the towers close to the base, robust ribs of the same material running in spurs up the sides of the towers for strength, like the strips of steel bracing her guards' helmets. Unbreakable _cuendillar_.

Most Aiel found the Malkieri fortress ugly and foreboding. 'The Anthill' was the name they used, among themselves at least. No sense in giving needless offense to a Malkieri armsman over such a worn joke.

Not to her. Shaiel thought the Seven Towers was beautiful, possessing an undeniable mathematical elegance, a three-dimensional tessellation, distributing the weight suspended above. _The Apiary_ would have been a better name, Shaiel mused.

Under its seamless ebony skin, the building was yielding up the secrets of its construction to her. The foundations of the seven towers were a hemisphere built of hexagons. Corridors like this one served a dual purpose. They were also the ribs of the building, the edges of those polygons. Other ribs had different functions, she deduced – drawing water from aquifers hundreds of meters below, disposing of effluent and doubtless many other purposes besides. The capillaries of a fossilized tree.

Turning a corner, the passageway angled up steeply, and Shaiel smiled, as one who knows a small secret. An incline of thirty degrees, precisely, if she was not mistaken. They were working their way around the circumference of the building, upwards. Soon, they would ascend to the upper surface of the sphere of hexagons, and would begin the ascent of one of the towers proper.

Her guess proved correct, just as she was revising her estimate of the precise angle her corridor was aligned at. _No, flat surfaces can be tessellated by hexagons, but spheres cannot._ What then? Hexagons and pentagons? _Interesting._

They entered the trunk of the tower through a door of cast iron some six inches thick which was opened for them by some unseen watcher above, the portal being retracted into the ceiling. It dropped behind them like a guillotine blade once they had passed the opening, a knell that echoed through the guts of the building.

Instead of the arduous climb around the broad circumference of the tower that she expected, they entered a narrow spiral stair that corkscrewed clockwise upwards. _Clever._ Any right-handed attacker trying to fight their way up into the bowels of the tower would find it difficult trying to bring his weapon to bear, giving the defender the advantage of both height and handedness. But futile, as it had proved. Myrddraal were ambidextrous, and better fighters than all but the greatest human warriors.

They passed in single file – first one Malkieri man-at-arms, then Shaiel, and behind her, the second man. The rattle of their armoured tread was loud in the confined space. Claustrophobic.

She surmised they were climbing one of the supporting ribs of the central tower. At periodic intervals, they reached landings, each with an iron door, indistinguishable from the one before, except the litany of ascending numerals inscribed upon the door face in the High Script, the designations offering no indication of what lay beyond.

At the fifth such door, they halted. Waited for the steel incisor to retract into the ceiling with a rattle and scrape of metal upon stone. Beyond was a second landing, and a second door.

At this juncture, Shaiel's guards stopped. One of them rapped a mailed hand upon the door as the other man bowed to her gravely. "We leave you here, Mistress Shaiel, and return to our duties. When you are done, we shall return and lead you back whence you came."

A pause. "Where your arms shall be returned to you." There was definitely amusement percolating through the guard's studiedly neutral tone, like a spoonful of honey stirred into a cup of _kaf. Fool of a wetland man!_

Briefly, Shaiel thought of standing the man on his head using the One Power. Or of sticking him to his comrade – Air and Fire woven just so, to create a massive charge of static electricity. _Tempting._ Instead she just looked at him. "Are you going to stand there all day? Well?" she enquired of him, mildly.

"Well, what is it, armsman?" A young voice interrogated the guard from the other side of the door. There was irritation, and a touch of entitlement in it. A voice she well remembered. _Al'Akir._

Not for the first time, Shaiel questioned the necessity of her coming here. A sly voice in her head: _Well, he is a well put-together young man. Those muscled arms..._ Nonsense! she told herself. She had a question about wetlander nobles. Where better to come to seek knowledge than a wetland noble from a line of ancient kings?

 _A Brown Ajah Aes Sedai, perhaps?_ that sly voice insinuated, mockingly, in answer to her self-examination.

Well. She was here now. And if she'd prefer to elicit the information she sought from a pretty young man rather than a condescending Aes Sedai, then what of it? An Aes Sedai who like as not would intimate she was wasting her time playing with spears, and suggest she avail herself of the opportunity to study at the White Tower. A suggestion, which would quickly become a demand.

Light! Aes Sedai and Wise Ones. They made her feel like a plump mouse caught between a hungry ridgecat and a ravenous wolf!

The first guard answered the Makieri prince. "Lord, you have a visitor. Mistress Shaiel, daughter of the Wise One Aviendha. Of the Seven Valleys sept of the Taardad Aiel..."

" _Nine."_ Shaiel interjected sharply. "The _Nine_ Valleys sept, wetlander."

The suit of armour shrugged wearily, his gesture accentuated with a clank of metal. "As the Mistress says. The Nine Valleys sept, lord."

The door creaked as it opened outwards, dispelling a wedge of light into the landing. Framed by it, the young Malkieri noble leaned his angular frame round the door to look out, his slender frame suddenly awkward. There was a thick leather-bound book under his left arm, his thumb keeping his place in the volume.

There was a diffidence in al'Akir that she hadn't seen before, expressed in the tightness of his shoulders. He raked the long fingers of his right hand through the rich chestnut of his hair in a distracted gesture before his hand returned to his side where it fidgeted nervously. His eyes darted to her face, instinctively, then lowered as if abashed, finding. As if he had looked into the sun, and been forced to look away.

"Shaiel," he spoke, his voice reverent, as if the sound of her name was a physical object he was examining. Something rare and beautiful. Frangible. A delicate piece of Sea Folk porcelain. With an effort, his eyes – frank, voluble – met hers. The damascened grey of a sword blade, true as tempered steel. "Please, come in" al'Akir bade her.

He stepped aside with a tall man's unthinking delicacy, swaying under the low lintel of the door. Shaiel noticed the thick iron door was panelled inside with a veneer of white oak, the venerable hardwood's whorled grain like the indulgent swirls of cream in a cup of _kaf_. Priceless in denuded Malkier.

Al'Akir motioned her towards a tall-backed chair of willow, whilst he perched his long shanks upon his narrow cot, facing her. Shaiel ignored the offered seat, instead choosing a spot upon the rug-covered floor, crossing her long legs comfortably in front of her. A cheery fire burned busily in the grate, cherry-red flames lancing from the hot coals matching the heat in her own cheeks.

With an effort, she refrained from smoothing out the creases in the trews of her _cadin'sor_ as if it were some wetland milkmaid's smock. What did she care if he caught a surreptitious glance at her legs? Not that al'Akir appeared to avail himself of the opportunity.

Looking down at the Aiel woman seemed to make al'Akir uncomfortable, however. After a long moment, he joined her in sitting upon the floor, bracing his back against the frame of her bed. He steepled his hands in his lap – perhaps to remove the temptation of fidgeting.

"To what do I owe the honour of your visit?" the young nobleman asked her, after a pause, finding a measure of self-possession in the respectful gentility of time-honoured words. The grave courtesy fitted him well, Shaiel thought.

"I seek a man. My father, Rand al'Thor. The Dragon Reborn." Shaiel began, uncertainly.

Al'Akir's surprise appeared to entirely unfeigned. "I am sorry, Shaiel" he replied, slowly, concern investing his words. "But it is held to be common knowledge that the Dragon Reborn laid down his life at Shayol Ghul. Certainly, he has not been heard from since."

Looking into his eyes, Shaiel's heart fell. There was no possibility that the Malkieri was dissembling. "Still, you might be able to aid me in my quest, nevertheless. I received a .. missive. A message in a bottle, washed up upon the shores of Time for me to find."

Seeing al'Akir's uncomprehending look, she forged on. "It matters not. Suffice it to say, the letter told me I would find the man I sought among the heirs of the Aramaellin people..."

Al'Akir interrupted her abruptly, almost rudely in his eagerness to be of assistance. "Then you have come to the right place, Shaiel. For we Malkieri are of that lineage. Aramaelle was one of the Ten Nations arising out of the Breaking of the World. It was a land forged from unceasing strife with the Shadow, a nation of warriors like Queen Kirukan.

When Aramaelle fell during the Trolloc wars, amongst the nations that arose from its breaking was Rhamdashar, which in its turn was subsumed into Artur Hawkwing's empire. After the Paendrag died, his empire splintered, and Malkier and Shienar seceded to become independent kingdoms.

The Kings of Malkier come from that stock. And the heirloom of my house is an ancient ring of gold, worn by the monarchs of Aramaelle and in their turn those of Rhamdashar that followed them. The ring my father Lan now wears. Bearing the insignia of ..."

It was Shaiel's turn to speak over al'Akir. "A crane, a lance, and a crown."

"A crane, a lance, and a crown," al'Akir echoed her, a curious look in his eye. "Just so."

The words from the scroll, written indelibly on Shaiel's mind, swam into focus:

"... _The other man in my vision – the Aramaellin – wears the_ hadori _of his people, and he is cast in the stamp of the mighty men of his race. He is a tall man, with chilling blue eyes and a face of weathered granite, and he carries himself like a warrior and a knight. An old man, with hair grey as iron, but perilous, I deem._ "

Of course, Shaiel realised. She had already met this man.

"Al'Akir" Shaiel addressed him. "I believe your father is the man I need to speak with."


	42. Chapter 42: Aan'allein

**Chapter 42: Aan'allein**

The Malkieri king dominated the room by the self-possession of his presence. He was not bullying, nor loud, nor flamboyant. He was not even richly-dressed, insofar as Shaiel understood the fashions of Wetland nobles. A tall man for a wetlander, tall enough to be noteworthy even among the Aiel, and broad through the shoulders. Shaiel knew many bigger men, among them her clan chief, Rhuarc's son Ronam, a craggy mountain of muscle. But al'Lan Mandragoran had a gravitas unlike anyone she had ever met. He simply _was._

An immovable object. A sword in the vise that had neither snapped nor bent, no matter what pressure the Shadow had brought to bear.

Shaiel found herself at a loss, for the first time in many years, as they stood facing each other across his chamber. Aiel did not bow. They certainly did not _kneel._ Not even to the _Car'a'carn._ A chief was due respect. The _toh_ of that respect was met in one's actions. Still, Shaiel felt something was lacking.

It was _Aan'allein_ who broke the silence, catching her off-guard. Instead of waiting for some sign of obesiance, it was he who bowed to her. "Kiserai ti Aiel" he spoke, gravely, as he straightened. _Honour to the Aiel._

"Welcome to my home, Shaiel. You may call me Lan." Glacial eyes met hers. This was a truly dangerous man, Shaiel sensed, and yet she felt safe in his presence. Just as she would when given guest-right among her own people.

A strange notion. Only a roofmistress could accept the guest-gift, yet this king had done so, and she accepted his right to do so as if it was the most natural thing imaginable. "My son, al'Akir, informed me you wished to talk to me of a private matter." Direct, and to the point.

Shaiel returned his bow. "Honour to Malkier, Shadow's Bane" she responded. Those blue eyes dragged the reluctant words from her through the jagged tangle of reluctance, bitter pain and anger. There was understanding there, too. The gaze of a man who had known loss in all its forms, and had made his accommodation with it. A compact free of self-pity.

"I seek a man you know. A man who you trained, who held you as friend. My father, Rand al'Thor." Shaiel spoke, feeling her heart inexplicably lifted as she uttered the words. As if she was releasing a boulder she clutched to her chest. "Until recently, I had thought him woken from the dream. Dead." she added in explanation of the Aiel idiom, flushing as she realised that _Aan'allein_ likely knew the phrase, and more besides.

Lan simply nodded. It was hard to think of him as simply 'Lan'.As another _algai'd'siswai._ A man. _Aan'allein_ was a representation of something far greater. An ideal that transcended even being Aiel. Light unyielding. Light defiant.

Shaiel clenched her fists into tight knots by her sides as she summoned up the courage to finish. "Recently, I received a message that told me he yet lived. Following that missive led me here. To you.

Lan, please tell me: Do you know where to find him? I am forbidden to speak of all I know on the matter. But it is of more import than a daughter's search for a long-lost father. Worlds hang in the balance. And I .. I think you know that. I think you feel that truth."

Lan paused. His face betrayed nothing whatsoever, hardening into granite, and it was then in that moment that Shaiel knew for sure that _Shadar Nor's_ letter was nothing but the truth.

Finally, Lan grunted, coming to a decision. "It is a secret known to few – not even my son. But he is here." Lan paused, and the impenetrable mien of his masked emotions slipped briefly, revealing a glimpse of deep currents beneath the surface. "Shaiel, permit me to share some shade ere you speak with your father.

Like you, I never knew my sire, the man my own son is named after. I have a few muddied recollections of him from infancy.

Sometimes, I think I dreamed even those up. A blanket to clutch around me in the dark of childhood nights, on the run. I, too, learned of my father through the tales of others. A legend, not a real man of flesh and blood.

In time, I grew to resent that paladin, that perfect knight. Because he was not there beside me. And sometimes, in my weakness, I wished he had never sent me away. What was the purpose of my life to be, anyway? My people were dead, my land engulfed and swallowed by the Blight as if it had never been, as if a thousand years of men, women and children's stalwart defiance of the Shadow was an irrelevance. All their sacrifice in vain.

No, better to die with Malkier, with my father and my kin, than live an orphaned life.

It was a feeling I never completely outgrew until I met my _mashiara._ Nynaeve. It was only then that I finally relinquished my hatred for my father. When I realised that he had not cast me out upon the world solely to be a sword in the battle against the Shadow.

He wanted me to live, to _love_. That was the point of Malkier. Its apotheosis. To wield the sword in order to protect and succour until the time swords were no longer needed. It is, I believe, a dream we share with the Aiel.

I digress, Shaiel. Forgive me. What I mean to say is this: Put away your preconceptions of who your father is, fashioned from make-believe and wishful thinking. It is a narrative that won't help you.

I don't know why Rand al'Thor faked his death, and hid the fact from the world, even his loved ones. We have not spoken of it. But I know that he loved Aviendha, your mother. Ay, and Elayne Trakand and Min Farshaw. More than life. He would liefer cut off his arm than harm them in the slightest way. The man I knew was not one to run from his responsibilities as a father. He never ran from anything. You and your siblings were _wanted_.

If I had to hazard a guess about why he left, it would be duty. A _toh_ as hard and unyielding as a mountain in his path. Maybe even this doom you tell me of. He left you for the selfsame reason my sire sent me away – because if he stayed, you would all die. I am sure of it.

None of which will assuage the anger you feel. Believe me, I know. You even have a right to it, just as I did. After all, it is not as if you were given a choice in the matter! Right or wrong, it is you and your mother and siblings that have had to live with the consequence of that unilateral decision. It is a spear that only you can lay down."

Shaiel swallowed. Nodded. She didn't trust herself to speak. Lan waited. He was good at silences, this man. Very Aiel. He didn't shame her, as many wetlanders might, even as her second-siblings would at times, by proffering unwanted physical intimacy, lowering his eyes to allow her the time to recover her composure in privacy, but offering the shade of his presence.

Finally, Shaiel looked up. Sniffed. Offered Lan the ghost of a smile. "Thank you, Lan" she spoke, quietly. This time, using his given name didn't feel odd.

"You are most welcome" he replied. His smile was unguarded. Hesitant. Like al'Akir's. Clearly not a man accustomed to public displays of emotion. "It has been good meeting you, Shaiel. Whatever happens with your father .. know that you will always find shade here, should you wish it. Your mother also. Nynaeve speaks highly of her, but we see her but seldom."

Lan took a deep breath. "Wait here. I will send for your father, and withdraw to give you two some privacy to talk. Shall I order the _shatayan_ to bring you both some tea? Or some _kaf,_ perhaps?"

Shaiel nodded. "Tea, if you please." A cup in her hand would lend her some much-needed poise. Right now, she felt twitchy. Nervous. Irritable. She felt like pacing. Like smashing things.


	43. Chapter 43: A Twisted Ring

**Chapter 43: A Twisted Ring**

Shaiel gave the man who claimed to be her father a suspicious, sidelong glance, before dropping her eyes away from his face, with the guilty feeling of someone caught doing something she shouldn't. Abashed, and caught off-guard – even though she had spent a good deal of the past eighteen years anticipating this day.

The cup of tea in her hand steamed, and she bent her head towards the hot fog, feeling its breath caress her cheek as she took a sip, shuffling her seat to half turn away from this tall raven-haired stranger.

His hands left his sides, palms open, facing her, a gesture of openness, even vulnerability, as if he was beginning opening his arms for a hug.

Anger, sharp as a shaving of metal pinked Shaiel, drawing blood. _What do you want from me?_ she thought, enjoying the artless anger of the thought, the rush of adrenaline like a draught of _oosquai_ in the belly. Warming. Disinhibiting.

"Stop looking at me like that." The words Shaiel uttered in a tone cold as ice startled her as much as him. Surprised by her own cruelty. The words breaking the silence like bone china shattering on a hard stone floor between them.

There was hurt in his eyes, sudden wariness. The winded look of a man taking a hard punch to the solar plexus. _Good._ Let him feel as uncertain, as uncomfortable as she did.

She watched him lower his eyes to a point on the floor in front of him, as if finding sudden interest in the tessalation of the smooth stone flags. He shuffled his feet. She watched him turn introspective, gathering himself. Discarding the words he had intended to say. Choosing others.

"You look like your mother, Shaiel" Rand said, finally. There was tenderness in his voice, a species of longing. Shaiel stared at him. Despite herself, her eyes kept returning to him. Searching for her sibling's likeness in his face and body, in his mannerisms.

"And you look like a stranger. A wetlander." Shaiel snapped. " _If_ you even are who you claim to be. You took what you wanted from my mother. Then you left without a backwards glance!

It took us a while to wise up. To know you for the liar you are. To stop waiting for you to return! We got over it – my mother, my sister and my brothers. We have no use for you now. You should have stayed away. Keep your explanations. Your justifications. I don't want to hear them. The only reason I am here is duty."

Swiftly, Shaiel outlined the story, the narration dry and emotionless. She left out nothing – not even her own shameful behaviour in drawing _saidar_ through Sorilea against her will. Any detail, no matter how small could prove vital. And her _toh_ to Sorilea remained unmet, the balance of it a weight upon her shoulders.

She finished the tale by reciting the contents of the letter written by Latra Posae Decumae so long ago. She had committed the letter to memory in case she lost the precious document, but she read from the scroll to Rand al'Thor, taking care to read the letter exactly as it was written down.

She watched her father's eyes as she recounted events. Such old eyes, hazy with recollection of long-ago memories. His emotions lay close to the surface, making him easy to read. They had flashed with indignant anger when she had read the passage from _Shadar Nor_ 's letter where Latra Posae justified her betrayal, as if it was a wound recently dealt. Widened with confusion shading into wonder at the revelation that his daughter, Shaiel, was _also_ the reincarnation of his bitterest rival.

It was strange, watching his responses, which seemed at times contradictory, not the mixed emotions of one man but the distinct reactions of two very different men. One entitled and angry, bristling with injured pride. The other grave and sad, a simpler man, worn with care and use like an old knife.

The former she found easy to despise. That man was a wetlander through and through. The second man she found herself liking, despite herself. _That was the man to watch, to mistrust_ , Shaiel reminded herself. That was the man her mother had fallen for.

His face had darkened with shame when the Ring of Tamyrlin had been discussed, a doubling of emotion. One man's guilt and shame. Another man's surprise and revulsion. She looked down at the twisted stone ring she had laid down on the coffee table. It seemed a weighty thing now. Pregnant with menace. All of a sudden, she wanted no part of it.

Shaiel snatched it up, feeling the uncomfortable, glossy texture of it against her fingers. Slick. Glassy. Uncomfortably warm. Her fist closed around it as she shoved it towards Rand al'Thor. "Here. Take it!" she demanded, disgusted by the raw, pleading edge in her voice. What would happen if he refused it? Left her its custodian? A physical manifestation of her shame, her unmet _toh._

To her relief, his heavy hand opened to her, its palm work-scarred as her own, the tracery of careless cuts and the calluses of work. She dropped her burden into it. Snatched her own away like a wary bird.

"I cannot use it" Rand told her as he accepted it. "Did you know that?" There was relief in his glance, relief that he had shouldered a portion of her burden. "Moridin burned himself out fighting me. I cannot channel. That probably makes me a safe custodian of it. Better me than you."

For all his introspection, his face had been tinged with sorrow but no judgement when she had narrated forcing Sorilea with _saidar_. That same look was back on his countenance now. "Or so I hope. I was once so besotted with the idea of power for power's sake that I was fool enough to _want_ to bear this. It was my most prized possession. _Because_ of what it was, what it stood for. What you did was a naive error beside that." He opened the strings of his wallet, dropped the _ter'angreal_ into it. "Believe you me. And yet the Light saw fit to use me, regardless." He frowned suddenly. "Why it has come to me now, I cannot imagine."

Without warning, the door was flung open, with such force that it banged against the wall. Lan swept into the room, turning to Rand and Shaiel without preamble. His face was framed in angry pallor, and his right hand lingered nigh the hilt of the long sword upon his hip. It was Shaiel whom he addressed.

"I am sorry to inform you" Lan told her. "There has been an attack upon your second-mother, Queen Elayne, in the Andoran capital. Many of her guards, including the First Prince of the Sword, were slain, and Queen Elayne carried off by the assailants. Abducted. The principal attackers were a man and a woman, both of whom used the One Power in the attack. Both remain at large and unidentified.

Forensic examination of the crime scene by Aes Sedai and Wise Ones – including reading the residues of the weaves – led to the discovery of the safe house used by the pair. An inn in the Lower City. It was their opinion that, considering the sophisticated nature of the attack, including the use of inverted weaves, that the perpetrators intended that their backtrail be followed there. At the inn, the trail grew cold. But the attackers left a missive for us to find."

Lan handed Rand a scroll of paper. It was addressed to the Dragon Reborn. "Discreet enquiries led to the message being delivered here, to Malkier."

Frowning, Rand unrolled the parchment. The letter had been written in haste, in the High Script. The script was angular, letters slashed angrily into the paper. A familiar hand. He felt his gorge rise. The icy hand of fear.

 _Lews Therin_

 _If you want to see your 'Ilyena' one last time,_ he read, the writer's derision as clear as his anger, accentuated by the use of quote marks, _come and find me where last we met. Not in this lie of a world, but the world between. We shall have a reckoning._

There was no signature. None was needed.

 _Moridin._

Rand closed his fist upon the scroll, crumpling it in his fist. The meaning was plain. The place of assignation was where he – as Lews Therin – had last encountered Ishamael. Lews Therin's palace, a few leagues from Dragonmount. The palace was an unmarked spot, now, not a stone now standing atop another in the place where he and Ilyena had made their home, raised their children. Where he had killed them all in his madness.

' _The world between_ ' meant _Tel'aran'rhiod_. The dream where dreams ended.

And Rand knew what the letter left unsaid. Implicit. Ishamael intended to bring him to the place where Lews Therin had lost everything. Where he was weakest. And there, the Betrayer of Hope would kill Elayne in front of him.

Rand opened his hand. Looked down at the offending document, balled up on his palm. His enemy had overlooked one thing in his madness. The mistake he always made. Time and time again.

He was _Rand al'Thor_. Not Lews Therin Telamon.

A twist of smoke started from the dry paper, a spot darkening upon the white parchment, spreading like an abscess. A lick of flame like the Dragon's Fang sprang from its surface, a dirty yellow flame, trailing soot. The paper ignited with a cough and a crackle. Rand tossed it into the fireplace, where it burned itself out upon the white ashes of the dying fire.

"I am coming for you, Elan Morin" Rand spoke quietly. Not a threat. A promise.


	44. Chapter 44: A Broken Mirror

**Chapter 44: A Broken Mirror**

The sky above was a charcoal smear that made Moghedien gather the folds of her dark garb around her, and shiver though it was not cold in _Tel'aran'rhiod_ , unless the viewer wished it to be so.

Like the tarnish on a silver mirror, the starless vault above had a grain, a texture. It revolved slowly as she watched it, around a singularity, the blank eye of a hurricane though the air was still, ambient. Humid, with the faintly used, oily texture she was accustomed to.

Reality here in the Mirror of Mirrors was a medium that an experienced Dreamwalker could shape by the exercise of their will. Consciousness collapsing the waveform of reality. The expression of an underlying, fundamental truth of the worlds – all the worlds – that _Tel'aran'rhiod_ reflected.

Each place in the dream world was a fiber of the cotangent bundle to the real world. To all the possible worlds. Like a drawing-pin shoved through a pad of paper, holding the pages together at a point. _Tel'aran'rhiod_ was the sheaf of all these fibers.

Objects present in the real world presented here as projections down through all the layers of existence, as tangible or ephemeral as the multiplicity and permanence of that object in the strata of _ta'maral'ailen_.

This was a perilous place. An echo chamber. You could die here. Trapped like a trilobite fossilised in marble. Memorialised.

Moghedien, attuned to this place as few others were, could close her eyes and _hear_ the tension. _Tel'aran'rhiod_ was friction, the force acting against choice and change, resisting the divergent effect of a multiverse branching with every tossed coin, every roll of the dice. That was why so many of the worlds were congruent, differing only in the smallest details.

But now the tension was ratcheting up, the fibers of the Mirror of Mirrors like the strings of a fiddle. The drunken fiddler, emboldened, intoxicated, seeking a brighter timbre, tuning up to play in a higher, brighter key. A semitone, then a tone, the strings stretching, warping, the pegs grinding in their holes, the fragile maple wood shell of the instrument groaning sympathetically, varnish cracking...

Moghedien watched Moridin work, her mouth pursing with impatient distaste. His concentration was intense. She could feel his focus, an awl deep within her mind. The raw matter of creation, aggregating, streaming and coalescing into walls, floors, ornaments, piling up like dust blown across a windowsill. It piled up in pallid drifts around half-seen objects, which seemed to take shape from nothingness like dust sticking to a glass rod by static electricity. Not because that was necessary to creating matter in _Tel'aran'rhiod,_ but because that was how Moridin visualised the process.

He was an impatient artist, his mind flitting from one object to another. A gilt statue of a leopard on an alabaster pillar was complete, right down to a veneer of recently-aggregated plaster-dust, as were three of four of the walls, riven with deep cracks, the filigree of silver and gold leaf warping and peeling, the paint cracked and blistered. The fourth wall and ceiling were a transparent impression through which she could see to the horizon, the suggestion of a hunting scene traced in the empty air in the carbon-grey of a pencil outline within a fully-realised frame crusty with gilt.

Outside the four walls, she could see the chalky outline of further structure. Moridin's half-remembered impressions of the rest of Lews Therin's palace. The spire of Dragonmount on the horizon had been obscured, Moridin hanging a two-dimensional canvas over it, airbrushing its edges into the surroundings. Dragonmount was simply too massive, too _solid_ for Moridin to simply uncreate.

 _Fool,_ thought Moghedien. Could he not see that even if he succeeded in faithfully recreating what he remembered, this place would be no more than a fane? A shrine to the past. A place hallowed in the artist's mind because it reminded Moridin of the greatest injury he'd ever dealt the Dragon, Lews Therin Telamon.

 _Madman!_

Elayne Trakand lay where Moridin had placed her, bonds of Air contorting her body into an arch. Not from cruelty, but to recreate the way Ilyena had lain. She had mercifully lapsed into unconsciousness, her tortured posture causing an agony of cramp that had made her scream herself hoarse, like a rabbit in a snare.

Moghedien had Healed her. "She will be of no use to you – to us – if she is dead!" she snapped when Moridin had turned on her, angry for ruining his tableaux. Moridin had not deigned to reply. Just whetted his introspective, secret smile.

It was then that Moghedien realised that the Betrayer of Hope had no intention of using the Trakand woman for leverage. He was far beyond that point. She intended to be a long way away when Moridin killed the Dragon Reborn's woman in front of him. That was a confrontation she wanted no part of. Yet here she was. Watching the lunatic finish his labour.

Moghedien looked down at Elayne Trakand. To her eyes, the Queen of Andor looked little like Ilyena Sunhair, whatever Moridin's claims that she was her reincarnation. Nevertheless, she had dressed her in the archaic clothes of the Age of Legends, coloured and styled her hair in the fashions of a culture three thousand years' dead. It was hard to change something about another person in _Tel'aran'rhiod,_ but it could be done. It was easier when your subject was unconscious. Moridin's monomania held her image in place.

 _How ironic_ , Moghedien thought to herself. Ilyena might have been full of herself, but she would never have worn a dress with such a low-cut bodice. The detail of her garb was foggy, unrealised. It seemed that Moridin's remembrance of Ilyena was less detailed than his recollection of her home. That was Ishamael's nature. To him, Ilyena was only important in terms of what she symbolised. A gaming piece on a _sha'rah_ board.

As if catching the direction of her thought, Moridin turned towards Moghedien, frowning. "Remove yourself," he instructed, curtly. Annoyance percolated back to Moghedien through the Warder-bond. "You have no place here. But don't go too far!" he warned her. "Lews Therin is _mine._ Don't presume to interfere. But if he brings friends with him, you will deal with them." Sneering contempt on his countenance. "Try and do better than you did against Ily.. Elayne. I am not minded to rescue you again, Warder-bond or no."

 _Now was the time to flee_ , Moghedien thought. She could feel Moridin's gaze like a sword-blade poised at the nape of her neck, dissuading her.

 _Wait,_ she counselled herself patience as she hunkered down into a dip in the broken ground, found the Void without seizing _saidar._ Concentrated. Slowly, like a cloth being steeped in dye, the Spider's garb and even her skin began to take its colour from the rocks and earth, like a chameleon, bleeding into the background.

* * *

Roughly, Moridin shook Elayne awake.

Wordlessly, the Queen looked up into his face. There was fear there, barely concealed behind a thin veneer of defiance, which was good, but no recognition. She struggled feebly against her constraints, the dazed look in her eyes sharpening into anger at the indignity as much as the discomfort.

"You don't recognise me, do you?" Moridin stated.

Elayne ignored the question, fixing him with a frigid look of loathing. "You killed my Warders. My Queensguard. Taringail." she spat. " _Their_ names mattered. Because they lived in the Light! Had families, loved ones that will miss them. Even dead, they signify more than you do alive. I don't care who you are, Darkfriend. That's the Light's truth. When you die, nobody is going to miss you. It will be as if you never were!"

Moridin's face darkened with anger. He grabbed her by the hair, twisting her head around to face Dragonmount, tearing down the obfuscating screen to reveal the broken, jagged fang of the mountain.

"Look upon what I wrought, you milk-hearted quim!" he snarled. " _This_ is what I drove your lover to do! Your precious Lews Therin! _Now_ do you remember me? I am the Betrayer of Hope! _My_ works are not so easily dismissed, or forgotten!"

He leaned forward towards her, eyes glittering with candid malice. "I am surprised you do not remember this place, Ilyena. Where you died. Where _he_ killed you. As easily as a child pulling the wings from a fly."

"Don't call me that" Elayne snarled through gritted teeth. "I am Queen Elay..."

"Queen Elayne of Andor, yes" Moridin waved a hand, dismissively. "And Ilyena Therin Moerelle come again." His tone was lecturing. A professor, correcting a poor student.

"Rand al'Thor recovered his memories of Lews Therin, didn't he?" Moridin continued, warming to his theme, seeing the truth in Elayne's eyes. "I suspect the trigger required to access the memories of past lives is the application of pain. Pain and madness. I could grant you that gift….." He straightened. Looked down at her. "Unfortunately, time is of the essence. And ours is short. The Dragon is coming to save you. Only to see you die in front of him once again."

Elayne's eyes flared with anger. Anger and the desire to draw blood. "He didn't even hate you, _Elan Morin._ My husband, _Rand al'Thor.._." she stressed the names ".. was able to rise above his pain, where Lews Therin could not. At the end, he only pitied you. Broken and beggarly as you are."

With a bestial snarl, Moridin's hands closed around Elayne's throat. Constricting. Throttling. A swordsman's embrace. The steel pressure of his fingers crushing the life from her like the jaws of a mantrap.

As the light receded, Elayne's last thought was triumphant. _At least I spared Rand from seeing this. He won't have to bear the thought that there was something he could have done differently to save my life._ The light was dimming now. Far away. A pinpoint. Then Light was the only reality.


	45. Chapter 45: To Rid The Disease

**Chapter 45: To Rid the Disease**

There was neither night nor day in _Tel'aran'rhiod._ But time passed. For Moghedien, it dragged. Everything had a limit. Even anticipation and terror. Waiting was hard, the hypervigilance her anxiety demanded of her becoming an end unto itself, the state of readiness, with nerves jangling outlasting the immediacy of the fear that caused it. For now, anyway.

Her tired eyes betrayed her, impressions of motion at the periphery of Moghedien's vision intermittently startling her. It was a constant battle, fighting the urge to flinch, to shy away from stimuli her body erroneously identified as threatening, the harbingers of an assault by stealth.

Her nose was running, her eyes streaming, the byproduct of both anxiety and lack of sleep, her body dumping histamines into her bloodstream to counteract the natural urge to sleep. Her very mucus burned her skin like acid, as she resisted the temptation to wipe her nose, thereby betraying her position to any unseen observer.

Moghedien hadn't slept more than an hour at a time since leaving Shaidar Haran in the company of Moridin. She hadn't dared. Certainly not now. Moridin would kill her for sure if she fell asleep at her post, even if the Dragon did not.

Moghedien had watched Moridin murder Elayne. Felt the toxic overspill of his emotions as he gave vent to the incandescent anger that blazed within. Fury followed by a descent through depression into a lightless and fathomless depth she didn't care to follow. She had numbed the Warder bond once again in response, to give her brief respite from Moridin's darkness.

Eventually, a full hour later, Moridin arose from where he'd slumped, staring at the ground, his face a blank mask. He resumed his work, recommencing building his folly with redoubled vigour. The labour appeared to give him purpose. Comfort, however transient.

 _He knows,_ she realised, as she watched him finish the ceiling and begin work on the remaining wall. _He understands that he is building his own past only to tear it down, over and over again. Once begun, he can never stop._

 _He recreates the tableaux, hoping that this time, he will be able to make different choices, or failing that, that somebody else will be strong enough to make him stop. To break the cycle. Somebody like Lews Therin._

 _The tragedy of his life is that that man never comes, or comes too late to save him from destroying not only himself, but the ones he loved, and finally the capacity to love itself._

For an instant, despite herself, Moghedien felt a surge of compassion for him. She ruthlessly stamped it out. _This man gave me to Shaidar Haran,_ she reminded herself. _He can burn, for all I care!_

She looked back at the building, Moridin having hermetically sealed himself into his own reality – his room completed, with himself locked on the inside, a man in a jail built by his own hands. A monstrous wasp, bloated with poison, forever circumlocuting the concave surface of the glass jar that imprisoned him. Round and round and round.

Inside, the room might be a perfect facsimile of the past. From the outside, the ghostly impression of the rest of the palace lingered, insubstantial, never having been fully realised in Moridin's mind.

Incongruously, the façade of the palace had never been erected at all, and the ephemeral floors, walls and ceilings surrounding the solid box of Moridin's finished room resembled a house of playing cards. She had brushed against one of those ghostly walls on her way out, feeling neither the tangible reassurance of solid matter nor empty air but an uncomfortable, static discharge of energy which raised the hackles on her forearm in protest...

This time, the movement her eye tracked was not illusory. At first, Moghedien thought her tired eyes were playing tricks. For here was Moridin, walking purposely towards the building. Yet only seconds before, she had seen him _inside,_ applying the final touches to his handiwork. _Impossible._

Then she began to notice the small, distinguishing differences. This newcomer, though lean and sinewy, was not famine-gaunt, as was the real Moridin. There was a sword at his left hip, whereas Moridin eschewed the practice of wearing a blade here in _Tel'aran'rhiod._ Why bother, when he could smelt one from Fire, or simply bring an ordinary blade into being with a single thought? And whilst both men wore predominantly black apparel, this man's apparel did not favour the high collar of lace Moridin had unconsciously chosen, a crisp cut patterned in the ancient style, with long sleeves.

Instead this interloper wore a Tairen coat, whose businesslike short sleeves revealed a white undershirt. The sleeves of the undershirt were rolled back, casually, exposing his bare forearms and the long, sinuous tattoo of the Dragon. Alarm woke in her breast. She had just enough time to send Moridin – the _real_ Moridin – a single, frantic thought:

 _The Dragon comes. He is alone!_

The Dragon's calm, assessing glance scanned the terrain. For an anxious moment, it passed over her where she lay hidden, in the dead ground. Moghedien hardly dared to breathe, fearing herself discovered. The moment passed, as she fought the temptation to bolt from her hiding place. There was deep relief when he passed her by without a second glance in her direction.

 _This is not your fight,_ she reminded herself. _If Moridin dies, you can survive the loss of a Warder. Other women have. And you have been through far worse._

She realised the possibility that Moridin would prevail had not even crossed her mind. She remembered the face of the Dragon Reborn. There was not an iota of fear. Nor even anger. He radiated assurance. The land seemed to tremble under his footfall.

He entered the structure Moridin had created without hesitation, the unfinished firmament withering at his presence, floors, walls and ceilings peeling back, away from him, leaves of a book set afire, curling away from an unseen flame.

* * *

The man who thought of himself as Death experienced the arousal of fear as the wall in front of him simply melted away under the blowtorch of the Dragon's will. Fear that felt like exaltation, the rush of being discovered. Found out. His sins laid bare!

At that moment, he knew he was going to die, despite his stratagems, the trap he had laid for Lews Therin to walk into. But what was that beside the chance to cast his anguish, his torment, in the face of his Creator?

 _Wherefore, then did you make me?_ his spirit screamed as he seized the Power in grasping fists. Wrested control like a man fighting to stand upright in the surf.

Moridin could not rise up to Heaven, to throw the Creator down from his serene, senile complacency where he looked down at his creation and called it good. To grind His face into the ordure, the scrabbling, impure, _unworthy_ reality of it!

But maybe he could do the next best thing. Kill the Creator's avatar. _Why make a man like me long for harmony, for perfection?_ And there was worse. The question he had spent a hundred lifetimes trying to fathom. _Why make a yearning soul, and give him only the talent to kill?_ He would _not_ be the Light's thrall!

 _Death is lighter than a feather._ The litany of good men and bad was the only truth Moridin had ever found. Lews Therin would kill him. That was how it always ended between them. But this time, the Light's champion was going to join him in death!

Through the haze of the collapsing wall, Moridin saw the Dragon. Saw his own face looking back at him as the dust cleared. It struck him like a physical blow.

A dizzying sensation, a refraction, seeing his image reflected in Lews Therin's eyes as he looked at him. _Two souls. One body._ Almost a paradox. _Who am I? Who is he? Who are we?_...

With a snarl of effort, Moridin shook off the lingering effects.

Rand strode forward, a conquering king. His gaze locked to Moridin's, he did not see the body of Elayne Trakand lying on the floor like refuse, nor did he grasp the significance of the room he had entered until the last instant.

Recognition came complete, when it came, his eyes widening with shock, but his foot had already crossed the threshold. The Dragon fell headlong into Ishamael's Dreamshard.

At the same instant, Moridin lashed out with the weave he had prepared, with all his strength behind it. A weave comprising all five of the elements. Spirit, Fire, Earth, Air and Water. _Healing._

 _Lews Therin looked up at Ishamael, briefly registering the dark-garbed figure of his enemy. The man who had Healed him. Both thoughts were an abstract. Uninteresting. He cringed on the floor, instead, cradling Ilyena's lifeless body in his arms. Her head was heavy on his breast. Dead weight._

 _The arithmetic of sanity was remorseless. Like being buried alive under a heap of stones. You could not mistake a dead body for a living being._

 _Ilyena's cheek was waxy, as if the faint golden hue of her summer tan had been a cosmetic that had been washed off, leaving a mortuary pallor, white shading to grey._

 _Her shimmering hair, infinitesimally fine filaments of electrum, had come unbound in the struggle, was fouled and clogged with plaster dust. Her eyes were open. Staring. The accusation in them unmanned him, but he couldn't look away. Refused to close them._

 _He had killed her. Broken her apart with idiot, mindless cruelty. He remembered doing it. He had been insane. But he remembered. If he shut his eyes, even for a moment, he would be forced to relive it, a moving picture playing on an endless loop. He'd been laughing as he did it._

 _Hugging her corpse, smelling the scent of her cooling body – that was unbearable. But the reality of it, the immediacy, kept the memories at bay. Better this than seeing himself murder his beloved, over and over again. The impossible task of reconciling himself with that reality. Trying to find some sort of meaning in it._

 _He looked up at Ishamael through the watery, rheumy eyes of an old man. "Kill me!" he begged. This was unbearable. This wasn't how things were supposed to be. This couldn't be real..._

(..It's not real! You aren't here! You are...)

 _A voice within his head. A woman's voice. Young, sure of itself. Scolding, impatient. Familiar somehow... He dismissed it. It was not Ilyena's. The only voice he cared to hear._

(..Damn you! Wake up!...)

 _Ishamael looked down with disdain, answering his pleas for mercy with a curt shake of his head. Negation._

(..you look but you don't _see._ Stop wallowing and ..)

(..Your name is ...)

The man who thought he was Lews Therin wiped his eyes on his grimy sleeve, and looked up again at Ishamael. There was apprehension on the Betrayer of Hope's aristocratic features now, the cultured contempt wiped away as if by a stinging blow from an open palm.

This was _wrong._ Wrong in a thousand tiny details, each imperceptible, individually insignificant, collectively telling a different story. Ilyena's perfume smelled unfamiliar. A statuette was missing from an alcove and the friezes had an unfinished, washed-out look. They were daubs, not the vivid, detailed frescoes he remembered so well.

Lews Therin turned his head. Saw the hole in the wall, and behind it the drab mundanity of the World of Dreams, the grimy smear of sky revealing a lifeless hue that could only be found in _Tel'aran'rhiod._

He remembered everything.

 _He was Rand al'Thor_.

The Dreamshard exploded as if a tornado had ripped through it, blowing apart Moridin's creation, scattering the pieces far and wide, which dissolved into the empty air. Not the One Power, but the force of the Dragon Reborn's will made flesh. Entropy. Anger.

Moridin bent like a tree in a gale as the tsunami blew past him, staggered by its force, until at the last, they stood facing each other across fallow ground.

At that moment, Rand looked down. One thing remained. One truth around which Moridin had fabricated his castle of lies. A dead woman. A woman that Rand al'Thor loved.

Not Ilyena.

 _Elayne!_

In that moment of weakness, of confusion and doubt, Moridin struck. A shield of Spirit, a blade sharp enough to separate soul and spirit, to pare mind from body.

In that gelid moment, the Betrayer of Hope's triumph turned to consternation as the impossible happened. The shield refused to slide home. There was nothing there _to_ sever. No connection to _saidin_ at all. _Impossible._

Rand al'Thor looked at him.

Moridin felt himself being picked up by a giant's invisible hand, and hurled out across the landscape with sickening force. The side of Dragonmount filled his horizon, accelerating towards him until it filled his uncomprehending vision.

At the last instant, the Dreamwalker belatedly recognised what was happening, tried to prepare for the inevitable impact with the mountainside, hardening his skin to the consistency of granite.

Too late.

Blackness.

* * *

Rand looked down upon Moridin. At first, he thought his enemy was dead, but closer examination revealed the man was only unconscious, his breathing so shallow he almost missed it. Rand placed his fingers on his neck to check his pulse, which was steady. Strong.

Moridin was in considerably better shape than he looked, lying crumpled like a ragdoll, with blood running from the corner of his mouth.

 _Bastard._

Killing a man in combat was one thing. Executing a criminal, even a murderer, was different. Harder. Rand had done both. Distasteful necessities. With fury and grief coursing through his trembling body, looking down at Moridin, he realised that whatever this man's crimes, dispatching him as he lay there insensible and helpless would not be justice. It would be revenge. Pure and simple.

 _What of it?_ snarled a vengeful portion of Rand's soul. There was a good deal of Lews Therin in that thought, too. _The man deserves to die. Why wait?_

Moridin moaned thickly, still out of it, muttering something incomprehensible. Was he waking up? Rand couldn't shield him without the Power. The only alternative he had was to try and effect some sort of control using his mostly unexplored _ta'veren_ abilities. _Too risky._

If Rand couldn't secure his wife's murderer to face justice, that left only one eventuality. No matter how unpleasant. Better that than risk him escaping and harming the Light only knew how many other innocent people.

He bent down. Picked up a rock that fitted his fist snugly. Hefted it. There was an undeniable _rightness_ to the feeling. A hard blow to the skull would spill Moridin's brains. A quick death. Better than he deserved. He wouldn't even feel it. _A mercy, really_.

The ugliness, the crudity of the thought appalled Rand. Delighted him. Still he hesitated. _Is there any reason not to kill this man?_ A question he did not expect to hear an answer for.

 _How do you know that what you and Latra Posae did – wiping a portion of this man's memories – did not destabilize Elan Morin's mind?_ the answer came, clear and full of conviction, surprising Rand. It wasn't the voice of Lews Therin. It didn't sound much like his own, either.

 _For that matter, what gave you the right to decide that his Light-given Talent – being able to 'crack' another channeller and draw upon them as you would an_ angreal – _should be withheld from him? Did it not occur to you that the Light – as well as the Shadow – intended a purpose and a destiny for him?_

 _A destiny that you took from him! A man you called friend and brother! You crippled him. Left him without even the knowledge of what he ought to be. What he had lost. Then you abandoned him to his madness as it consumed him!_

 _Yes, Elan Morin did many evil things, and his insanity does not fully exculpate him for all of his choices. He still chose to despair, and that is a sin. He chose to serve the Shadow, and that is also a sin – that of pride. The two original sins from which all others spring._

 _Do you remember what it was to kill Ilyena, consumed in your own madness? There was guilt, but do you deserve to be punished for it? No! You were helpless in the grip of a compulsion. Of all people, you should be able to find compassion for Elan. Even forgiveness._

 _As Lews Therin, you never overcame your hatred for Ishamael._

 _As Rand al'Thor, you were able to lay aside your hate. But you replaced it with contempt, and called it pity. You never acknowledged your own fault._

 _Can you bring yourself to forgive him? Forgiveness and justice are not incompatible. You can sentence a man to a just death without holding hate in your heart for him. You know it is so. The things men do are abhorrent. Hateful. But hating a man is an offence against his Creator._

Rand thought of Elayne, lying there, her neck bruised and swollen by Moridin's rude hands and his heart rebelled against what he was hearing.

 _He killed her just to spite me!_ Rand retorted, flushed with anger. _Ilyena come again, the most faithful friend Elan Morin ever had, and he murdered her! Whatever good was in Elan Morin, he is no longer that man. Moridin is irredeemable!_

The voice inside fell silent. Not conceding the point, just watching. Waiting to see what he would do.

Rand's hand cramped painfully on the rock he was carrying. Reminding him he still carried it. With an effort, he released it to thud upon the ground.

Rand looked down at Moridin once again, squatting down on his hunkers beside him to assess his injuries, performing a rough battlefield triage. Broken femur, likely some shattered ribs. Cuts and contusions everywhere. The Dragon placed a hand on his brow. Feverish. Moridin groaned. Wherever his mind wandered, he was still in a lot of pain. _Good!_ thought Rand with a measure of satisfaction _._ Perhaps he would do the world a favour and die on him.

Looking at the Betrayer of Hope just increased his anger. It was impossible to forgive this man. Even if he had the desire to, he didn't know where to begin.

 _Find a way to help him,_ the voice answered. _The feelings will follow._

Rand wished he hadn't put down the rock. He stood up, knees cracking as he straightened his legs. It didn't look like Moridin was going anywhere for the time being. Just as well, because right now, he didn't trust himself near him.


	46. Chapter 46: The Grief Of Kings

**Chapter 46: Grief of Kings**

"Don't even think about it!" Rand had told her, levelling a warning finger.

Shaiel's chin climbed a half inch. "You don't get to tell me what I can and cannot do!" she stated with practiced hauteur. This dialogue, at least, was to some extent following the script she had imagined in her mind's eye. There was a comfort in that familiarity.

"This is not some childish game" he retorted. "Ishamael is out there, waiting for me. The other one – judging by the eyewitness description – is Moghedien. The Betrayer of Hope and the Spider. Two of the most dangerous people ever to walk the face of the Earth."

"Then you will need me to watch your back" Shaiel countered, malachite eyes gleaming readily. _Her mother's eyes,_ Rand thought ruefully. _Too bloody eager by half._ "And don't pretend otherwise" Shaiel asserted. "With no false modesty, I am one of the strongest and most practiced channellers in the world. And it will not be my first dance..."

Rand shook his head. "Hit-and-run skirmishes with Shadowspawn under the cover of darkness." he stated, dismissively. "That's the extent of your experience. Not real battle! Nor a one-on-one confrontation with a powerful adversary, steeped in three millenia of darkness! An enemy who knows you are coming, armed with the Light only knows what. _Angreal, sa'angreal, ter'angral,_ a shocklance perhaps… No, you're staying right here. And thankfully, you don't have a say in the matter. I don't need the Power to make a Gateway where I am going, so you won't be able to follow!"

"Won't I?" Shaiel smiled triumphantly. "I know where you are going, near enough. I heard the message, just as you did. And you just told me who sent it. You're going to Dragonmount, or near enough. The last place Lews Therin faced the Betrayer of Hope. If you won't take me with you, then I will make my own way there. I too have walked the Dream, many times, and know its ways."

"If you have indeed walked _Tel'aran'rhiod,_ you should know its dangers." Rand muttered sourly, scrubbing a hand through his hair. "And have an appropriate respect for them." A note of pleading had entered his voice. "I cannot make you stay, nor stop you from following me. And I have observed many times that the _Car'a'carn_ cannot order an Aiel woman to do anything she doesn't want to do. If my word has no weight, then think what your mother would want..."

"My mother does not mistake me for a child." Shaiel frowned. _A low blow. Even for this Wetland cuckoo._ "Even if you choose to see me so, I am my own woman. I make my own choices. Since you have said what you should not, I will remind you of your own shame. You have _toh_ to me and my sister and brothers. _Toh_ like a mountain!

I will put this in language that even a _Treekiller merchant_ , a _Two Rivers tradesman,_ can readily understand. The first down-payment on your debt to me, the first pebble in the mountain you need to move, is that you will allow me to come with you from your own free will. Else, I will never speak to you again in this dream, or the life that follows afterwards. Do I make my meaning plain?"

"I would rather" Rand replied, frowning. "lose you from my life a thousand times than lead you into danger once. But since I cannot stop you from coming, or talk you out of it, best you come with me, so we fight together, coordinated."

Shaiel nodded impatiently. This was no more than merest common sense. "I have a condition of my own, though" he stated, and suddenly his posture shifted, the slightest increment, a subtle readiness that only a warrior would pick up upon.

 _If I say no,_ Shaiel realised, _he intends to knock me senseless and leave without me._ She readied weaves of Air to halt him in his tracks. "What is it?" she asked, lightly, as if the matter was of no moment.

"Do you know the Warder-bond?" he inquired. Shaiel was nonplussed. "Yes, of course," she responded, "my second-sister, Ishara Trakand, taught me it." She sniffed, deprecating a foolishness she would never be privy to herself. "She imagines the day she joins the Green Ajah, and takes her own Warders. It has some similarities to the first-sister bond.."

"I want you to take me as your Warder. At least for this battle. You can release the bond afterwards, of course."

Shaiel stared at him, incredulous. "Why in the _Light_ would you want _that_?" It was .. _improper!_ Obviously so!

"Because it will give us an edge which we are going to need when we dance the spears" Rand replied. "You will be able to sense what I sense, feel what I intuit. And vice versa. So we can communicate without the need for words or even.." briefly, amusement creased his face "...Maiden hand-talk. That is my condition."

 _At least I would know the truth about what this man, who calls himself my father, really thinks. What his designs are._ The discomfort could be borne. She shrugged, uncomfortably. "Then let it be so." she assented.

"One final thing..." Rand al'Thor spoke, mildly, but his posture still held that coiled readiness. Evidently, she had not assuaged his fears as yet "..that I would like to know, before we embark upon this... foolishness. Are you afraid?"

Pride bubbled up inside Shaiel. _Was she..?_ That was not something you simply asked! Not even of a near-sister! She met his gaze. Saw the anxiety in his own eyes, and the determination. This was not a time for bravado. _Well, he will know the truth soon enough. When I bond him,_ Shaiel decided.

"I feel... as if I am like to wet myself with fear" she stated, colouring. "If that makes me a coward, so be it. But my sister-mother needs my help. _Our_ help. And, without false modesty, I think my strength is equal to the task. If my heart does not fail me." she finished, in a rush.

"Good" Rand nodded approvingly, his posture relaxing fractionally. "Me too. I wouldn't have let you come if you weren't properly pensive. Don't worry" he assured her. "You won't freeze when the moment of truth comes. The Oneness will give you the clarity you need. But more than that. You have your mother's heart."

Despite herself, Shaiel found herself flushing at the praise. "Now what do we do?" she asked.

"You bond me as Warder. Then we get the _shatayan_ to bring us some tea, a little food, and we make a plan. Get our souls right with the Light. Then, and only then, we go."

"Do we have time for that?" she asked.

"We can't afford not to" he replied. Such old eyes. Careworn. "I've been doing this a long, long time, Shaiel," he told her, "as Lews Therin, and then as Rand al'Thor. Unpreparedness, recklessness gets you killed. Our enemies want us overwhelmed with emotion, with fear for our loved ones, and with hate and anger. But remember this, always. _We_ are their objective. Elayne is a means to an end."

"Does that help you cope with the fear?" she asked him. "That feeling of powerlessness?"

His blue eyes met hers. "Only sometimes" he told her seriously. "But what else is there?"

* * *

 _Hurry up and wait._

Compared to her father, steeped in experience, Shaiel might be a babe-in-arms, but she had learned one thing of the dance of spears that was the Light's own truth. A truth that rarely entered the fireside tales. The exhaustion of forced marches to gain an advantage, then the enforced boredom of ambuscade, lying in wait, silent and still, for hours, even days.

No song of battle ever mentioned the labour of burying your own excrement in a scrape in the ground, either! These were the kind of things your elder spear-sisters told you as they laughed at the disgusted expression they saw in your eyes. It was their job to beat the child out of you. To fashion a woman from a girl.

 _Hide in plain sight._

Shaiel needed to piss. Which was a problem, considering her position. She hung spread-eagled in what was hopefully the last place the Forsaken would look for her, the position of maximum vulnerability. A thousand feet overhead, hovering like a hawk.

She folded the light around her through the conscious exercise of her will, not the One Power, so that, from the ground, she should remain invisible as she drifted into position, inching over the target area with a painstaking lack of speed. There was no wind here to blow her off course as she made patient progress towards her destination.

She wished she had not drunk quite so much camomile tea. There was no rain in _Tel'aran'rhiod,_ and while it might be amusing to piss upon the Shadowrunners below, it wasn't a joke worth dying for.

Shaiel was normally serious-minded, not given to levity, but despite the serious nature of her mission, she felt an unfamiliar giddiness, as if a weight had been lifted from her heart. She had found, to her chagrin, that she enjoyed her father's company, despite his presence in her mind. Perhaps because of it. They had laughed together as they enjoyed water and shade.

Shaiel felt the truth of his love for her, the grief and longing in his absence that he had felt every day. It was a hard thing to acknowledge, but Rand al'Thor had genuinely believed that he was protecting them all, just as he had said. A man's foolishness, true – the _Car'a'carn_ was still just a man, with a man's foibles. As much as – if not more so – than any other.

He did not have _toh_ towards her. She saw that now, hard as it was to acknowledge, because it negated her right to own the anger she held towards him. After this was over, she would tell him his debt was paid.

Shaiel hadn't been enamoured of her father's plan, however. To her, it had seemed needlessly reckless. Like climbing into a lioness's mouth in order to choke it to death.

Rand had been sure that there was no other way. "I cannot escape the jaws of the trap. Ishamael is a master of the World of Dreams. He likes Dreamshards. A nested world within _Tel'aran'rhiod_ where he is a dark God, and reality itself molds to his will. He will seek to draw me into one of his design, the lure laid from skeins drawn from our shared past."

He fixed Shaiel with a stern glance, and she felt the strength of a _ta'veren's_ will resting around her protectively, like an arm around her shoulder. Gentle, reassuring, safe. But possessing an undeniable authority that implacably fixed her in place. "No matter what you see playing out within the Dreamshard, _you must not follow me into it_. In that reality, you have no power. You will merely become another plaything, a weapon for Ishamael to use against me. You understand?"

"I will not simply watch and wait" Shaiel had told him, bristling.

"No more will you" he told her. "The other one – Moghedien – will doubtless be there. I will need you to watch my back as I dance the spears with Moridin. And if you get a chance – if and only if I can free Elayne from the Dreamshard – bear her to safety. Don't wait for me."

"And what makes you think you can survive in Moridin's world where I cannot?" she had asked him then. "What makes you think you have the strength to escape Moridin's dream?"

"Because" he told her, with another rare smile, "' _with no false modesty_ ', I am the Dragon Reborn. _Tel'aran'rhiod_ is my place, not his. And there is another, better reason. The Warder-bond. It is an indissoluble part of me. I will be able to hear your voice, even in the Dreamshard. It will remind me of who I am."

* * *

It had taken all her discipline to simply wait and watch as her father walked into the Forsaken's snare. Her heart clenched with anticipation as he approached the structure Moridin had built. To her eyes, the wall-less, roofless building appeared like a honeycomb, exposed to the sky. She seized _saidar,_ willing herself to stay immobile as she readied weaves, splitting her flows. _A shield. Lightning_...

She felt Rand enter the _ko'di,_ a shield of ice falling between his mind and emotions. His racing heart steadied. He was one with her. One with the sword at his hip. The ground beneath his feet. One with his dark adversary. He did not tarry, nor did he rush. _This is a man,_ Shaiel though, with pride. She could understand now why the Aiel had chosen to follow Rand al'Thor.

Shaiel felt the moment that her father fell into Ishamael's Dreamshard as a lurching sensation, the ground giving way beneath her. The connection between her and Rand vanished with a burst of static. A bowcord snapping under strain. She could no longer hear him in her mind.

Below, Ishamael's trap, now sprung, showed its true, hideous shape to the outside world, presenting as a blister of pure black growing tumescent from the ground, a lightless hemisphere.

Shaiel fought rising panic, burrowing deep within the Void, chasing the thread of shared consciousness between them as it snapped backwards like a broken bowcord. Twice now, she nearly had it, but it twisted from her grasp, allowing her only the briefest sensations. Impressions. _An ornate room. The dark man. A dead woman._ Her father, trapped within a stranger's consciousness, a man broken by grief.

"It is not real. You aren't here. You are.." she told him. Tried, anyway. The connection ripped through her fingers, slick as _saidar_. _You are Rand al'Thor,_ she finished the thought in her own mind, uselessly. _You need to fight!_ she told him. Told herself. This was difficult. Like trying to pick apart a Gateway, but twice as dangerous.

Had he heard her? _Had that been Elayne lying there?_ The dead woman was like, and yet unlike. The similarity between near-sisters, maybe. A useless thought, Shaiel knew only too well, leading only to introspection or despair. Neither of which would help either her father or her second-mother. _If she is dead, you cannot help her. Control what you can control,_ she demanded of herself.

"Damn you. Wake up!" She almost had it that time. She was running out of time. Her father did not recognise her. Nor she him. Perhaps that was it, she realised. She was searching for Rand al'Thor. But her father was two men. Rand al'Thor and Lews Therin Telamon. A madman who had killed his wife, and then himself. Shaiel shuddered. That knowledge was a beginning, however.

The room was another clue. A representation. A recollection. _A lie._ However good Moridin's memory of their confrontation had been, it was a reconstruction. A construction. An idol. _A fane._ You assembled a memory from bits and pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing, extrapolating from what you knew, papering over the cracks. A memory wasn't truth.

She forced herself to remain calm. To wait. Not to lunge for the connection between her and Rand al... _Lews Therin,_ she reminded herself. That had been like trying to catch a reflection in a puddle of water.

Instead, she let her hand slip below the surface, waiting to catch what she sought, like a Two Rivers lad catching a fish with his bare hands. She would only get one more chance. If that. _I must be sure._

She felt his presence, and snatched at it, fumbling, pouring all her impressions into her sending, made desperate by need. _It's a lie. This room. What you're experiencing. It's a poor copy, not the real thing. The hooks he has set in you are the pain of your memories. Lews Therin's memories. That's what he's using to hold you here. Stop feeling and start looking!_

The connection vanished again, shorting out. She wasn't sure how much she had succeeded in conveying to him.

 _Tel'aran'rhiod_ rippled like a pool of water after a stone had been dropped in it, almost throwing Shaiel from the sky. The Dreamshard exploded with a high glassy note, sonorous and sweet, which seemed to come from everywhere at once, its detritus dispersing almost as soon as it was exposed to the air. A lie conceived in darkness brought into the light.

Moridin faced her father across Elayne Trakand's body. To Shaiel's eyes, they were alike as two brothers. Both men were absolutely motionless, imbued with the dangerous potential of an arrow on the string of a drawn bow.

She felt Rand's anger shatter the Void as he struck the Forsaken, the air in front of his fist hardening into a hammerhead. A terrible stroke that hurled Moridin into the side of the mountain, landing in ruin like a fallen star. The gentleness she had felt at the heart of her father, a blacksmith's gentleness that sought to create and not destroy, was gone. Swept aside. Obliterated by a wrath that she recoiled from.

Shaiel reached out through the Warder-bond to him – and was swatted back into her own body with such stinging force that she almost lost _saidar._

Shaiel held her position. Moghedien was still out there. She was sure of it, although she had not spotted the other woman. The tools of concealment changed, but they were cosmetic. The underlying principles remained the same.

Whether by disguise or camouflage, by Folding Light or the Mirror of Mists, she could feel her enemy's presence underlying it, an unseen presence in the landscape. A scent, a spoiled note of something rotten. The Spider was good at the game, blending into the shadows with the ease of long practice.

In the real world, Shaiel would have discovered her opponent eventually, by inference if her senses were not sufficiently keen, watching the places that animals and birds avoided. Here, there was no fauna to give the Forsaken away. But _Tel'aran'rhiod_ was alive, itself, in a different way to the real world. Better still, it was sympathetic to the desires of the men and women who walked it.

The Maiden's sharp eyes combed the ground, taking care not to linger in any one spot too long. _There._ Shaiel smiled. A gap between the rocks, small enough for one body to curl up in concealment. She couldn't see the other woman. But the surrounding area was dark. Far darker than it should be, as if occluded by a shadow. A shadow in a land without sun. _Moghedien likes the dark places._ The land, responding to Moghedien's innermost desires.

There was still the possibility – however remote – that this was a projection. A feint. So Shaiel stayed in place, the unobserved watcher.

She didn't have to wait long. As soon as the Dragon departed, following Moridin, Moghedien crept from her hiding place, furtive, smelling the air. She suspected the presence of unseen eyes. _Good instincts,_ Shaiel thought, with grudging respect.

With the sound of tearing paper, the Shadowrunner began to weave a gateway, working with feverish haste to firm the rectangular portal. Shaiel dropped to the ground soundlessly behind her, raising her black veil. She did not need to stab this _da'tsang_ in the back. She intended to tell this woman who was killing her, and why.

"Turn and face me, Shadowrunner!" she snarled.

Moghedien turned slowly, purposefully. "Wilder _child_!" she sneered, feeling the power in Shaiel. The Aiel Maiden felt the Spider unveil her strength, the nimbus of her _ara'i_ sliding like a blade, with deliberate slowness from where it had been concealed, bright as a sun from behind an eclipse. Hoping to cow Shaiel with a display of her raw strength. The Forsaken had been holding _saidar,_ masking her ability and inverting the weaves she held.

The dark woman struck in the same instant, Fire and Spirit, a blow and a feint, concealing a shield with which she intended to sever the younger woman. This Shadowsouled was strong and fast.

Shaiel was quicker. She too had been concealing the full extent of her ability. The severed weaves snapped back into the Spider. Shaiel responded with two shields, one fast, the other slower, hiding behind the leading edge of the first. A clever trick, one learned from her sister-mother Elayne Trakand. A true warrior. You needed to be very strong indeed for this to be a worthwhile gambit.

Moghedien ripped the first apart like paper.. her eyes bulged with shock and fear as the other fell like an axeblade on her unprotected connection to _saidar._ Somehow, Moghedien withstood the stroke, throwing all of her energy into a protective shield, protecting her all-important connection to the Source. Half Shaiel's considerable strength was not – quite – sufficient to shield or sever a woman as powerful as the Spider.

Moghedien's shield firmed, throwing Shaiel's back. In response, Shaiel poured all of her energy, not just half, into her own shield, sawing away at Moghedien's lifeline to _saidar._

Shaiel walked the Forsaken down, a spear flashing into her hand. Only a fool saw _saidar_ as the only weapon. Either her shield would cut Moghedien off, or her spear would carve out the Forsaken's heart. Either was fine with her.

A clap of thunder behind Shaiel distracted her momentarily. Not the Power. Just a trick of _Tel'aran'rhiod._ A clever ploy. _Use every weapon._ It bought Moghedien the time to firm her defenses, her connection with _saidar._

With unexpected, sinuous speed, the Spider hurled herself sideways, vanishing mid-leap as she abandoned the fight, streaking beyond the horizon in a single stride. Shaiel was there right behind her, the soft felt of her boots slipping, skidding upon the marble floor of the Stone of Tear.

Lightning gouted from Shaiel's hand, tearing up the floor and shattering the empty plinth upon which _Callandor_ had rested for so many centuries with a guttural belch of thunder. Moghedien half-turned midflight, a bar of white light arcing from her left hand that chopped through pillars of stone as if they were empty air. _Balefire._

Shaiel deflected the beam by lensing the air, changing its refractive index, the arc of destruction bending like a ray of light passing through water, scything over her head. She was all but deafened by the roar of collapsing masonry as Moghedien sought to make good her flight, pulling down the building behind her into a maelstrom of choking dust and broken rock. Shaiel concentrated on seeing what should be there in place of the falling stone. _Just air._

She reached out to the ground ahead of her quarry. _Quicksand._ It caught the fleeing Forsaken, making her miss a step, before Moghedien reflexively firmed the ground under her feet. She hurled a shield at her fleeing enemy's back. _That's for my second-mother, you worm-hearted wretch!_

Reluctantly, Moghedien turned to fight. And fight she did, with the fury of a cornered ridgecat, hissing and clawing. In the end, Shaiel proved the stronger, throttling her with a shield of Spirit that chewed through the Forsaken's desperate defenses.

As the shield slid home, Shaiel stood over the other woman as she lay helpless on her back, her head resting at the foot of a broken marble pillar. Shaiel tugged down her veil, shaking the dust from it, taking care not to step within arm's reach of the defeated Shadowrunner. There was no sense in taking chances.

She looked into her enemy's cowed eyes. Cowed but still watchful, a rat looking for a bolthole.

"You killed my second-mother" she accused flatly. "My aunt. Queen Elayne of Andor."

"Not I!" Moghedien gabbled. "Moridin did that! He is a madman.."

"You will both pay for it" Shaiel told her, implacably. "Even if your tale is true, it is joint enterprise, by Andoran law. You will die according to the justice of the woman you wronged, Shadowrunner."

The only warning Shaiel had was a gleam in Moghedien's eyes. She felt the air thicken about her throat. Not the Power. This was something else...

A leashless _a'dam,_ snapping into place around Shaiel's neck.

Shaiel flailed, willing it to discorporate, as Moghedien, impelled by an equal desperation, exerted her own will to firm its existence, into a solid collar. If that _thing_ ever closed around Shaiel's neck, it was over. A battle of pure will.

Moghedien's smile was cruel. She thought she was winning. Perhaps she was. It was easier to imagine a thing than to imagine _nothing._ "I learned this trick from one of my enemies," the Spider said, conversationally, despite the magnitude of their struggle. "Nynaeve al'Meara." Moghedien smiled at the look of recognition in Shaiel's eyes.

Shaiel released the Power, shield and all. She couldn't spare the mental energy to sustain it and hold Moghedien's _a'dam_ at bay. The Shadowsouled was too reliant on the Power. The temptation to lunge for it might distract her. Buy Shaiel time.

Hungrily, Moghedien grabbed for the Source, and in the same heartbeat, Shaiel destroyed the unformed _a'dam._ A knife solidified in Shaiel's hand, long and keen, as she hurled herself at the Forsaken.

The Power flared around the Spider, weaves snapping into existence. A Gateway. Moghedien dove for the door, flickering into one of those distance-blurring jumps as Shaiel threw the knife. Choosing to run rather than fight. _Da'tsang!_

The blade clattered uselessly from the stone floor, skittering away. She had missed her mark. The Gateway fell like a guillotine blade behind Moghedien. Shaiel reached out, trying to read the Residues, to find out where her adversary had gone. _Nothing._ Inverted weaves? Shaiel didn't know. She was gone.

She had failed.

Shaiel sat there awhile, staring at the place where the Gateway had been, watchful. Half-hoping Moghedien would return. Half-relieved it was done for now.

Some time passed.

* * *

Rand al'Thor appeared, winking into being from nothingness. Shaiel could feel him through the Warder-bond again. No doubt that was how he had found her. A slumped form beside him, a badly-beaten man, apparently unconscious, reclining on what appeared to be empty air. _Moridin._

There was a second bier. With a heavy heart, she saw that Elayne was laid upon it. He had closed her eyes. Clasped her hands upon her breast.

Rand had cleaned the dirt from her cheek and hair, which fell in red-gold lustre, spent coin. A woman's glory, framing cheeks made wan, white and pallid in death. White too were her garments. As white as the Light indivisible.

There was a drawn sword laid at the foot of the bed, its slightly-curved blade of watered steel insigned with a heron mark. Tribute to the Lioness of Andor.

Her own heart was too heavy to bear the sight. She looked away.

Shaiel gestured to Moridin. "Dead?"

Rand shook a heavy head. Anger chased his features, followed by shame, and then determination. " _Gai'shain._ " he said, eventually, knowing the nuances of it would not be lost upon her. _Under his protection._

"Why?" she asked, finally.

"There has been too much death today" he answered her, after a pause. An incomplete answer, she sensed. Shaiel waited a moment to see if he would speak again on the matter. She saw that he would not.

"What will you do with him?" she asked, a little frightened by the gravity of his silence, the weariness she felt through the bond they shared. War-weary, tired men could do terrible things. She did not fear his wrath for herself. Only that in the extremity of his grief, he might do some nameless, unspeakable thing, some act of revenge upon a defenceless man, and besmirch his righteousness.

"I do not know" he told her, simply. "That is the Light's truth."

"I failed, Father" Shaiel spoke, shame knifing her breast suddenly. "Moghedien escaped me."

Rand only shrugged. "You are alive. That is victory enough for me."

With gravity, Rand bent forward, eyes shimmering with unshed tears. Chastely, he kissed Elayne's forehead. The grief of two, very different men was in his face and bearing, expressed with a restraint that was timeless and somehow more poignant than any wild outpouring could ever be.

That solemnity spoke of the deepest respect. Just as Lews Therin grieved Ilyena over the centuries, even through madness, so would Rand mourn Elayne. "Forgive me, _masharia_. I was too late to save you" he spoke to Elayne one last time in a husky voice, which at the last cracked like a shattered bell. In that moment, he reminded her of Lan, tall and grim and grave. She was afraid of him then. Afraid for him.

Her father's grief was a very private thing, Shaiel sensed. So was hers. Together, and yet separate. She sensed that if she went to him, to offer comfort, she would not be rebuffed, but this wasn't the time for it.

After awhile, Rand stepped towards Shaiel, offering an arm to help her rise from the cold floor where she sat, legs crossed. She took her father's hand. He pulled her to her feet with an easy strength. Her own legs trembled with fatigue. Sorrow, hollowing her out.

"Come, daughter" he said, with a weary smile that was somehow more terrible than any tears would have been. "Let us take your second-mother home."


	47. Chapter 47: My Business Is War

**Chapter 47: My Business Is War**

 _The less clothing a woman was wearing,_ Mat Cauthon mused, _the less she wanted you to look._ In which case, he concluded, never had a man been in more danger of having his one good eye poked out with a sharp stick!

 _One day,_ he considered in the private space between his ears, _I shall write a book._ 'Mat Cauthon: Of Women'. Of course, immediately thereafter, he would have to go into a hermit's seclusion if he wanted to maintain a whole hide!

The Borderlanders seemed intent upon making such a simple, wholesome occasion as bathing into the most uncomfortable experience imaginable. It should have come as no surprise, really, considering their predilections for other hazardous preoccupations. War, for instance.

The Malkieri, in particular, seemed to have elevated stoic suffering into an art form. It was his experience that most honourable peoples were so damned _uncivilized_ , when you got right down to it.

 _Probably best to keep that observation to myself as well,_ Mat decided.

Right now, his bare and bony arse was perched on a rickety wooden bench whose slats were digging uncomfortably into his backside. His knees were pressed together, and his elbows tucked in as he was pinned uncomfortably between the large, muscular and very naked forms of the Taardad chieftain, Ronam, son of Rhuarc on his left, and Lan Mandragoran on his right, which had the added effect of making him, Mat Cauthon, the Prince of Battles, feel somewhat scrawny and undersized. _Like a plucked chicken._ Not to mention somewhat lacking in scars!

They sat in what had once been the swimming-pool of the royal bath-house, which was of course, dry. The Thousand Lakes of Malkier were silty meres, and its rivers ran shallow, so water was at a premium, not to be idly wasted on luxury. Instead, the Malkieri had adopted the Aiel practice, converting the pool into a fumarium, like a giant sweat-tent.

The pool – fifty yards long and thirty wide, its floor and walls tiled with some matt-glazed ceramic – was packed with people, the vast majority of them female. Aiel Wise Ones, representing every clan and hold, leavened with a few Aes Sedai from the Green and Yellow Ajah, most of whom dwelt right here in Malkier, in the Seven Towers.

There were a few Aiel men here at the convocation, but not too many beside the clan chiefs. And precious few wetlanders. Lan and Nynaeve were both here, obviously, representing Malkier. More surprisingly, so was Tuon, and he was here, somewhat as an afterthought.

Seated immediately opposite him were Nynaeve and Tuon, hip to hip. His wife's dusky skin was sheened lightly with perspiration. Mat was pretty sure that the Empress of Seanchan didn't do anything so common as merely sweat.

Well, for his part, he was sweating like a pig! And he didn't know where to look. His wife might be comfortable naked, but if she caught him looking .. or looking like looking .. let alone ogling, there would be trouble, hot and plenty of it! You could count on it!

Mat tugged on his foxhead medallion, which hung round his neck, reassuring himself it was still there. No harm in checking, not when a man found himself surrounded by a few hundred women who could channel.

It amused Mat no end, the way Tuon took on around Nynaeve now. Like a kitten with a mother cat, following her around, imitating her mannerisms. Of course, it was considerably less amusing when you considered that most of what his wife was learning was how to channel the Power. How to be an Aes Sedai. Then again, even without the Power, Tuon was more Aes Sedai than most Aes Sedai... _More Aes Sedai than most Aes Sedai? Light, he rambled when he was nervous. Even in his own head!_

It was hard not to notice Nynaeve's heavily-pregnant condition, seated where she was. He might be a lecherous man by inclination, but he wasn't a _pervert._ As he was forever reminding people, there was a difference. Not to mention the fact that Nynaeve was basically his sister. An elder sister, true, tough and ruthless. Yet family, all the same. But there was an awful fascination with things a man knew he _shouldn't_ look at. His traitor eye kept trying to return to the huge gibbous moon of her belly.

This heat was enough to drive a man mad! Chuffing like a knackered carthorse, he was!

With a huff of annoyance, Mat picked up the bottle of beer that he had placed in front of him. A gift from Lan, no less. Proof that whatever men thought, that Old Stoneface did indeed possess a sense of humour. Something Mat already knew to be a proven fact. After all, he had married Nynaeve!

The bottle of brown glass was slick, wicked with condensation. A novelty to Mat. Glassware had been expensive in the Two Rivers, when he had left it. Beer came in barrels, or in pewter tankards. Glass was for wine. Perfume. Evidently, the Two Rivers had its own glassblower now, churning out cheap bottles for beer.

There was a label on the bottle, drawn in black and red ink. "RED HAND ALE" it proclaimed, and below it a drawing of the Red Hand of _Shen En Calhar._

Below, at the bottom, in smaller type, was written the following. "Brewed in the Two Rivers by Eldrin Cauthon and Husband. Master Brewers by Appointment to the Steward." A grin puckered his face. Sharp as a tack, his sister Eldrin. She didn't miss a trick. He took a swig. Sweet as a nut. _Here's to you, Eldrin. May it do ya well!_

The Steward, of course, was Lord Perrin Aybara. Queen Elayne had named him 'Steward to the Lord Dragon', which on paper made the Two Rivers a Stewartry, he supposed. But lands weren't governed on parchment, and neither were the hearts of free men.

Amongst themselves, the folk of the Two Rivers spoke another name for the place they called home. Especially when a visiting Aes Sedai – Moraine of the house Damodred – saw fit to disseminate the translation of the name from the Old Tongue to the Common:

 _Manetheren._ The Mountain Home.

Manetheren remained a friendly neighbour to Andor, but its true allegiances lay with the Borderland nations. Saldea, of course, and Malkier, Shienar, Kandor and Arafel. The world had moved on. As had he. He couldn't help but worry about what his countrymen had done, in seceding from Andor.

Yet a small part of him – an echo from all the past lives where he had bled and died under the Red Eagle – felt something great and grand stirring in his breast to hear the name 'Manetheren' spoken again.

The past cast a long shadow.

 _Carai an Caldazar. Carai an Elisande!_

 _Heh._ It would all work out. Perrin was nobody's fool. Neither was Faile, come to think of it.

Mat turned his attention back to the conversation, which he'd been following with half an ear. Basically, as far as he could follow, the Aiel were diplomatically sounding out the possibility of calling upon the other nations and powers for aid, in expectation of an attack by both Seanchan and Sharan forces, whilst at the same time trying to neither lose face in the process, nor inadvertently insult any of the nations they hoped to recruit to their cause.

All very serious, and all very boring! In his many lifetimes, Mat had been privy to many such occasions, and from bitter experience knew the point at which the polite chicanery of _Daes Dae'mar_ ceased, and the parties finally got down to serious business. Mat was a general, not a politician. _Thank the Light!_

"First of all, we need to send emissaries to the White Tower," a Yellow Ajah Aes Sedai began, waiting for Nynaeve's nod of approbation before continuing. "The Tower has long been the mediator between the nations..."

"And the greatest source of division amongst them" muttered Sorilea, just loud enough to carry. An interjection pitched deliberately to interrupt the speaker, who was drowned out by the murmurs of approval for Sorilea's words from a large, vocal contingent of Chareen Aiel Wise Ones. "No! We must go to our friends in the Borderlands first" she declared, stridently, with an imperious nod to Nynaeve. "To Kandor and..."

"You're all wrong" Mat spoke quietly, a matter-of-fact tone that cut across the hubbub. He was confronted by a sea of angry faces. Nynaeve and Tuon's were just shy of irate. He couldn't read minds, but if he had a coin to gamble, he would have bet the words that were in their minds were: _He'd better have a bloody good reason for putting his oar in._

Well, they _had_ invited him here. "Look" he began, holding out his hands in placation, "the first order of business is this: You need to find some _evidence._ Other than the word of some Shaido whose immediate family are best known for trying to kill the Dragon Reborn and attempting to sack Cairhien for a second time. Which in turn will remind them of who sacked Cairhien the _first_ time round. Namely the rest of the Aiel. Well, _I_ know different, that it was only two clans and that you had a reason and all that, but _will they?_ "

"People need a flaming good reason to go to war. Particularly wetlanders. And wetlanders aren't Aiel." For the first time, he received a few nods of grudging acknowledgement. "Wetlanders have ... a different relationship ... with the truth. They won't just take your word for it. They're looking for an excuse to mind their own beeswax and stay out of it. Take it from me, we're slippery bastards. I should know. Trust me. Well, don't. That's kind of my point. I _did_ warn you."

 _You're rambling, Cauthon. Get to the point, before they chuck you out on your ear!_

"The next thing we need is _intelligence._ Now, I've spoken to Muradin, and he seems a decent sort. I believe him. But his account is sketchy on the details.

Now, I'm a general. My business is war. I want to know how many men my son has with him. How many _damane._ How he intends to supply them with provisions and keep them in the field. And how long he intends to field such a force. The same for the Sharans, if we can get it. The best way of obtaining that information is through eyes and ears on the street.

As luck would have it" Mat continued, warming to his theme, "I already have such a network in place, in Seanchan and this side of the Aryth Ocean. Amiable old fellows, mostly, happy enough to sit in taverns with the brave soldiers of the Raven Empire, and buy them a drink. Listen to their war stories. Some likely lasses too," Mat added, flinching at a frown from Tuon before continuing "who enjoy the company of men, and profit by it, who occasionally supplement their income by supplying a word in the right ear. A name, usually. They wet their beak," Mat said wryly, enjoying his _bon mot_ , "so to speak, and we profit by it. Knowledge is power." Mat said, deliberately.

Tuon gave him a small, tight nod. There was pride in her glance. Annoyance, too. She truly hadn't know about Mat's Magpies, which warmed the cockles of his heart. A man always needed a secret.

"Once we have what we need," he began again, "and it won't take long, we send our emissaries, to everyone who will receive them. Even to the places that are ill-disposed towards our cause. Everywhere except Seanchan and Shara.

I'm a pessimist by nature. We need to impress upon these 'neutrals' that we have long memories – and long spears – and will remember not only our friends' names, but our enemies' too. The last thing we need is other nations pitching in with Seanchan and Shara for a piece of the pie."

"You've mentioned the names of our natural allies. Andor. The Borderland nations and the Two Rivers. The White Tower. You've omitted an important name from the list. One who must make common cause with us. As powerful as the Aes Sedai, and not bound by the constraint of the Three Oaths. A friend of the Light that the Seanchan have vowed to destroy, and the Sharans to enslave. The _Asha'man._ We need to send to Logain Ablar."

Mat picked up his ale, and drained it in a swallow, looking around at a silent room. "Well, that's my two'pennorth anyway" he remarked, to nobody in particular. "The Light's blessing on all here" he added, as he rose to his feet. You could never be too polite, especially with Aiel. "I'm off to take a nap" he remarked over his shoulder as he left the room. "I'll see myself out. You know where to find me when you're ready to talk turkey."


	48. Chapter 48: A Sinner's Pride

**Chapter 48: A Sinner's Pride**

Moridin smiled disdainfully at them, drawing himself up to his full height with a sinner's pride, every movement languid. Shielded, beaten and battered, he still gleamed with weathered, obsidian malice. A flint knife, his edge knapped to wind-cleaving keenness by his enemy's blows. His wrists were manacled together behind his back, attached to a hasp on the wall behind him with a stout iron chain.

Shaiel stared at him with the guileless countenance of the young, her face frozen with anger and revulsion. It was her shield that restrained the Forsaken. She had already felt his might and wile as he had tried twice already to seize _saidin_ from her. So sure he had been in his strength, that he could simply brush her aside!

It was far easier to maintain a shield than to burst through one, but even so, she had been hard-pressed to contain him, as the shield flexed under his assault. She had felt his contempt: _they think to shield me with only one woman!_ slowly giving way to a grudging appreciation of her strength.

He had fought, anyway, until exhaustion overcame him, and – breathing hard, sheened with sweat – Moridin gave up pressing against the slick surface of the invisible barrier standing between him and the True Source. He had given her the barest nod of acknowledgement. A gaze of chilling malevolence that promised her suffering for having the temerity to stand against him.

Rand, Nynaeve and Shaiel stood facing the Forsaken across the room. They were in one of the holding cells, deep within the bowels of the Seven Towers, far underground, a rough-hewn chamber carved into the bedrock. An illusion of security given by strong walls and bars of wrought iron, by armed guards. All redundant against a captive that could channel, that had the Talent for Gateways.

Moridin knew it. They knew it too. It hung between them, unspoken, heavy in the scales, implicit in the wintry promise of the Forsaken's smile, the calculation in those glacial eyes.

 _My father was a fool to think to make such a creature gai'shain_ , Shaiel feared. _This Shadowsouled knows neither bonds nor honour._ Still, Rand al'Thor was her father. And she would try and honour his wishes.

Shaiel was uncomfortably aware of Moridin's essence, pressing up against the shield once again. Not forcing, this time. Patiently waiting, alert for any opportunity. The hardening of a tied-off shield, or the trembling surrusus of momentary distraction or fatigue on her part.

Moridin broke his long silence. "Lews Therin I know, and el'Nynaeve ti Mandragoran – peasant spouse to brigand king" he sneered. "But you, wilder child, I know not."

Shaiel matched his stare without replying. Moridin laughed humourlessly. "I had heard Lews Therin had taken a concubine amongst that rabble of Aiel savages. I had not heard she was so young" he commented, disdainful. "No, you cannot be she. His daughter, maybe?" Her face must have given the Forsaken his answer. Toying cruelty in his voice as he continued. "If I were you, girl, I would stay away from Lews Therin. Ask him sometime what happened to his children by Ilyena the Fair."

 _I should like to gag him,_ Shaiel thought to herself, resisting the temptation. She needed all of her strength to maintain her shield upon this vicious blacklance.

"Still," Moridin needled, the venom of his gaze falling upon the bleak gaze of Rand al'Thor, "perhaps the presence of your daughter can in some small measure console for the loss of your Ilyena, your Elayne. Your vaunted love must be a paltry, permissive thing to be so easily assuaged." A pernicious smile passed over Moridin's face, hard as hail as he saw pain spasm across his enemy's features.

 _Bite your knife,_ Shaiel reminded herself. She longed to raise her black veil, and ram her beltknife into this crow's black heart, but her father had forewarned her. "Words will be his weapons now. Whatever he says, however cruel, you must control yourself. We all depend upon you to restrain him. So it is you that he will seek to provoke, even if it appears his words are intended for me."

"Be calm, Shaiel" Rand reminded her gently, otherwise appearing to ignore Moridin.

"It is time, Shaiel" said Nynaeve, as she found the Flame and the Void, teetering on the edge of seizing _saidar._ Of being seized by _saidar._ Eight months pregnant, it was highly dangerous for the Malkieri queen to channel the Power, her control uncertain. But she could be safely incorporated into a circle, yielding up agency to the woman who directed the flows.

The situation was an uncomfortable reminder to Shaiel of her unmet _toh_ to Sorilea, as she reached out for _saidar_ through the other woman. She was loath to link with Nynaeve, even with her explicit permission. Yet Shaiel would need her strength for the task at hand.

Shaiel felt Moridin rise up, taking advantage of her distraction. No doubt, the wily Shadowsouled had been alerted to the infinitesimal change in the surface tension of the shield, like a spider feeling a fly land on its web.

The Forsaken struck the shield with all his might, and she felt it strain under the blows, flexing like a soap bubble as she enfolded Nynaeve into her circle. Power rushed into Shaiel, an ambrosial torrent of heat – _Light, the other woman was strong! Very nearly as powerful as Shaiel herself –_ and she reached out her hand, pushing Moridin back down into subjugation with unanswerable strength.

Shaiel could the blackthorn snarl of Nynaeve's presence in her mind, a flower on a thornbush, a jagged tangle of emotions – joy at holding the Power, frustration at yielding control of _saidar_ to her amongst them. And something ineffably wondrous, too. A quiet, dreaming presence. With awe, Shaiel realised that was Nynaeve's unborn child, half-stirring at an unfamiliar presence. Reaching out toward Shaiel with naïve curiosity. _Concentrate_ , Shaiel reminded herself.

Rand turned to her. "Bind him with Air" he instructed. They had discussed this earlier. They deemed that Moridin – wrists fettered in irons – was still dangerous as a Knife Hand or a Warder. A master of unarmed combat. They could afford to take no chances.

 _Before you milk a serpent, you must draw its fangs._

Redoubled by Nynaeve's might, Shaiel divided her flows, maintaining her shield upon the Forsaken with the greater part of their combined might. With what remained – a tithe of their strength – she cocooned Moridin from feet to neck in Air, rendering him immobile. Quickly, she tied off the flows. In time – half an hour to an hour – the bonds would evaporate, but they would be sufficient to the task at hand. She nodded to her father. "It is done" she told him, pouring all her strength into the shield once more.

Moridin did not deign to struggle against the bonds of Air. "I am intrigued to learn what the noble Lord of the Morning, that paragon of virtue, intends with a shielded and defenceless prisoner" he spat at Rand. "How low you have stooped, that you make your own child party to such a dishonourable enterprise.

Then again, who is to say what behaviour is beneath such degenerate fruit of a spoiled tree? A rabble of tent-dwelling brigands and murderers whose very ancestors would disown them." There was a gleam in his eye as he turned on Shaiel.

"Your mother called you _Shaiel_ , did she not? I would think your father should know better. 'The Dedicated Woman' _._ Names. So much power in them. _Aiel._ 'The Dedicated'. _Jenn Aiel._ 'The True Dedicated'. Dedicated to _peace,_ child. Or did you not know? And yet there you stand, with your knives and your spears, and your little black rag to hide the shame in your eyes as you murder. The bitterest jest of all.

You cannot deny your nature, little girl. I can see you long to kill me. To break the bonds of honour and cut out my heart! Why deny yourself? What is one more broken oath, to a people whose very name is a reminder of their dishonour? What is one more falsehood, for a girl whose very name is a lie?

The only pure thing in you is your lust to kill. Take it from one who knows. Do it!" he snapped, his voice ringing with authority. " _Kill me._ Silence the truth! It is all you are good for."

Nynaeve stepped forward, taut with anger. There was a cup in her hand, a plain clay vessel which steamed. Moridin stared at her in disbelief. "You mean to _poison_ me?" he laughed contemptuously. "And you an Aes Sedai of the Yellow Ajah. A _healer_?"

"Oh, shut up, Darkfriend!" Nynaeve snapped impatiently. "It's only forkroot tea. It will stop you channelling, meaning that you won't waste our precious time and energy guarding you. You can sit here, alone, in your precious, petty Darkness and sneer away to your heart's content then, without subjecting goodfolk to it, until you face the Light's justice."

The Queen raised the cup to his lips. "I advise you right now not to shut your mouth, or to try and spit it back in my face. Or trying to bite me! I have brought plenty more tea, and a funnel. I have had plenty of practice administering medicine to reluctant children back when I was a Wisdom. I'll hold your nose, and you'll swallow. You won't enjoy the experience."

Reluctantly, Moridin swallowed the tea without protest. His face pursed with disgust as she forced him to drain the cup of tepid, brackish liquid. "You _are_ trying to poison me, witch," he muttered. "I have drunk forkroot tea before, and it did _not_ taste like this. What else did you put in the cup?"

Nynaeve's smile was sharply satisfied. "I may have added some sheepstongue root" the Queen commented idly. "Very good for sprains and contusions, of which you have many. It has a regrettably soapy aftertaste, which in your case might serve to wash the foul words from your mouth.

Rand, if you would be so good" she added, with a sniff, "please bring me the pitcher. I think it best to give this man another cup. By his own admission, he has drunk the tea before. I can't take the risk that he has built up a resistance to its effects."

After a second cup, Moridin appeared more tractable. Forkroot tea made one feel unpleasantly drowsy, a very uncomfortable sensation for anyone surrounded by their enemies who wanted to keep their wits about them. It almost made Nynaeve pity him, seeing him so reduced, his intelligence muzzled, eyes glazed, almost bovine, filled with desperation and exhaustion.

 _Careful,_ she warned herself, hardening her heart. _This is not a time for compassion._

When Nynaeve and Shaiel were both certain that the Forsaken was no longer able to reach _saidin,_ the young Aiel woman released the shield, ready in an instant to take it up again if Moridin even looked like channelling. The two women, still linked, shared a look, and a terse nod. It was time to do what they had discussed.

Shaiel reached out with the Power into Moridin, Delving. Her skill at Healing was trifling, especially compared to Nynaeve, but Delving was trivial. But it was Nynaeve's expertise she was drawing upon as she scanned the body and mind of the Forsaken, Shaiel's hands guiding the searchlight, but Nynaeve's eyes directing its beam.

Moridin was bruised and battered. Two broken ribs, a bruised spleen, a shattered tibia, numerous cuts and contusions. Grudgingly, Shaiel began the weaves for Healing, the elementary sort. Water, Air and Earth. The obvious yet superficial damage might be masking some deeper, more fundamental and yet more subtle injury. Something that basic Healing wouldn't touch.

Feeling the Delving, the Forsaken glared at them, then at Rand. "What are your pets trying to do to me?" Moridin demanded of the Dragon.

"If I told you," Rand told him in a weary voice, "you wouldn't believe me."

"Try me, Lews Therin."

"They are trying to help you, Elan Morin" Rand told him. "To Heal you, in fact. Not just your cuts and bruises, but your insanity."

Moridin looked at him, taking in his serious expression before bursting into incredulous laughter. "You're actually serious, aren't you?" the Forsaken mocked. "You actually think this pair of half-bright wilders can cure that which the greatest minds of the Age of Legends could not? Face it, Lews Therin, there's nothing to Heal. I'm not insane."

"We shall see, Elan." was Rand's only answer. "I will let them be the judge of that."

"Why do you even pretend to _care_?" Moridin snapped. "I liked you better when you, as Lews Therin, just left me to it. It was more honest than your self-serving attempts to help me."

"Because" spoke Rand, softly, "I wronged you, then. Because I still owe you the truth. You had a Talent, Elan Morin. The ability to Force linking. Latra Posae and I neutered you. We severed the pathways in your mind that allowed you to be aware of and to access that Talent. We also blocked certain of your memories. That is why you came to hate me, despite not recalling why."

Moridin stiffened, his eyes boring into Rand's. "Do you think telling me this will gain you sympathy? Can you imagine I will forgive you, Lews Therin? I am past forgiveness. Confessing to me may assuage your guilt. But I now know I was right to hate you above all else.

I have some advice, Dragon. You had best kill me now. Because if you do not, at some point, your vigilance will fail, and I will escape to take my vengeance. On you, and upon everyone you have ever loved. You already know this. So why bother?"

It was Shaiel that answered for her father. "Because he has _toh_ to you, just as you have _toh_ to both me and my father and so many others. You may be deadened to your own shame, _da'tsang_ , but in acknowledging his offence and trying to repair the damage he has done, my father has taken the first steps towards meeting his obligation to you. Now, enough talk" Shaiel told the Betrayer of Hope brusquely. In the same breath, the Maiden readied the flows for Healing and began.

Moridin writhed, gasping under the frozen grasp of the Healing, breath hissing from between clenched teeth. The two women paid his struggles little mind as his bones knitted, inured to the sight. Both had seen the effects of a Healing scores of times before. Healing took a cost from both healer and the invalid. The Forsaken would have to eat soon, and plentifully, in order to recoup the energy expended in the Healing.

They resumed their Delving, narrowing the arc of the light they shone into the dark recesses of the Forsaken's mind.

Shaiel felt something.. off. A wrongness. Something she couldn't narrow down, something that refused categorization. _Perhaps that was simply the signature of a Darkfriend's soul?_ Shaiel didn't have the experience to know.

Nynaeve shook her head.. of course, the other woman could hear her thoughts, to an extent. "No," the Malkieri queen informed her, "that feels quite different. In fact, if I had to say, it feels like this man has thrown off the yoke of the Dark One. He doesn't feel like a Darkfriend. But for all that, he feels … perilous. Like Shadar Logoth. An abiding hate for everything and everyone. Even himself."

Rand spoke to Nynaeve. "When I had Asmodean captive, and when I fought Be'lal and Asmodean, I could see .. feel .. these lines of darkness, connecting the man to the Dark One. Do you feel anything similar with Moridin?"

Nynaeve shook her head again. "No. Then again, perhaps I might not be able to see such things, in the same way I cannot see flows of _saidin._ Yet my instincts tell me that even if I could not see them, I would feel myself tripping over them, like tent-ropes in the dark."

Nynaeve turned to Shaiel. "Let me guide the flows" she demanded peremptorily of her young co-worker, in a tone that would have been a credit to Sorilea herself.

Shaiel shook her head, stating the obvious. "You can't. Not in your condition."

"Your presence in the circle should buffer me" Nynaeve retorted.

"And you are certain of that?" Shaiel asked her, dubiously.

"Reasonably so," Nynaeve told her, shortly. Judging by the tightness in her eyes, the Aes Sedai felt the pinch of the Three Oaths there, like an ill-fitting shoe. Not quite a lie. By a hair's breadth. "We are getting nowhere like this, in any case. You don't have the feel for it."

"Fine" bristled Shaiel. "We'll try it your way. But at the first sign that you are losing control, I will reassume control of the link."

Nynaeve felt the balance between them shift, like a compass-needle reversing polarity. It was sweetness simply to be a conduit for so much pure _saidar._ To actually direct the flows was .. exquisite.

She was minded of trying to light a fire from damp tinder. _Bring your flint in closer,_ she told herself, finessing the Delving weave. She was the steel, the flint. One with the spark, with the colossal weight of _saidar_ poised delicately, a mountainsuspended on its point. A scalpel of infinite length, parallel rays of Light tapering incrementally to their asymptote at infinity, infinitely sharp.

Nynaeve could feel Shaiel's buffering presence, sure and solid, bracing her, the banks containing a surging river as she probed, painstakingly thorough in her examination.

There was the body, and there was the spirit, and then there was the flesh of the spirit, cocoon of the infinite between both, a limbic system, the Creator's handiwork keeping ineffable soul within a house of flesh, the immaterial bounded in finite clay and ashes.

Moridin's soul, old and weighty, hung suspended overhead, hovering above _soma_ and _sarx_. So much Light Nynaeve wanted to weep. So much Darkness she wanted to vomit. To flee for the safety of her own body.

She did not dare turn her scalpel upon the furnace of the Forsaken's soul. Only the Creator or the Dark One could seek to touch such an object and not be annihilated. _So much energy in a single soul,_ she wondered.

Nynaeve knew one thing. Never again would she ever take a human life. Not even to save Lan's, or her children's. Not when she saw the Creator's imprint on the soul even of the Betrayer of Hope.

Instead, Nynaeve turned her attention not to Moridin's soul, nor to his body, but instead to the network between spirit and body. An impenetrable tangle, unfathomable, except for a few recognisable features – the bridge that allowed a person to channel the One Power amongst them.

In Moridin's case, this was a thick taproot between Mind and Spirit, lying dormant under the effects of the forkroot tea instead of glowing brightly. Many of the fibres of his _soma_ were similarly suppressed, making them hard to see.

 _I don't know what I'm looking for anyway,_ conceded Nynaeve in the privacy of her own mind, _and in this tangle, I might search forever without finding anything._ Yet the pervading feeling of wrongness endured.

 _Bring your spark closer._

A flash of insight dawned. She recalled what Rand had told her. _I'm looking for a Talent,_ she realised. _Something dysfunctional that looks like the wound of Severing, perhaps?_ With one realisation came another, hard upon its heels. _Shaiel has the same Talent, but hers is functional!_

Suddenly, Nynaeve saw it – a spur, an outgrowth from the huge branching tree of connections that had something to do with _saidin._ A spur that lay dead and dark because the link below to Mind had been truncated, as if by a dull knife. A ragged wound, leaving the bottom of the link a blackened, blistered and festering thing.

She touched it with the tip of her probe, delicately, and felt .. something. A sympathetic resonance in Shaiel's mind across the link between them.

Sudden, unexpected anger flared in Nynaeve's heart. Not for Moridin this time, but for Rand. What he, Lews Therin, had done – severing the link of consciousness between Moridin and his Talent – was every bit as damaging as stilling a person outright. True, Rand – and presumably Lews Therin – had a very limited Talent for even the basic art of Healing, so he likely wouldn't have understood the ramifications of such a brutal cautery. All the more reason not to meddle with it! Light! _You arrogant, high-handed, ham-fisted butcher….!_

With a snarl, Nynaeve wove. Spirit to cut open the abscessed flesh of Moridin's spirit, making a clean surface. Then a hollow tube of all five Powers, a two-ended fingertrap of Spirit, Air, Water, Earth and Fire which enmeshed the ends of the severed connection, the flows melding into the surface at each face. Then, slowly, deliberately, Nynaeve drew the sutures of the One Power closed, sealing the wound. It was no more difficult than sewing a severed vein or artery.

The greyed-out connection flared with sudden light – like a glowtube, flickering, before igniting in an incandescent burst. Light raced from the connection along the neural network of Moridin's _soma,_ branching out, an unstoppable tide pouring through the capillaries and arteries, before surging up into the forbidding magma of the Forsaken's soul itself.

Nynaeve found herself suddenly very afraid. _What have I done..?_ she had time to think before Moridin's soul went nova. A light that plunged through the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, wrenching, her and Shaiel out of Moridin's mind and out of consciousness. The last thing she saw was Moridin looking down at her, solemn eyes lucent and forbidding as the grave. Rand lying senseless beside his daughter's unconscious form. Then nothing.


	49. Chapter 49: Hands That Guide The Blade

**Chapter 49: The Hands That Guide the Blade**

Moridin, shaken, looked down upon the inert body of his fallen foe.

War was a business of sudden strokes. Of unforeseen opportunities. The balance of a sword's edge. Or the edge of a coin, poised to fall. But what he and Lews Therin had owned a gravitas beyond chance. An interference pattern, splinters of light forced through narrow apertures, cohering into sudden meaning. Light and darkness in a deadly dance. _Ta'veren_ against .. whatever he had been tempered into. A Thakan'dar blade.

But he could not have foreseen this eventuality. Mere chance had no place here. It was an interloper, stealing the meaning from this moment, relegating it to the tawdry inelegance of burlesque.

 _Get up, Lews Therin!_ he willed the Dragon Reborn.

But Rand al'Thor remained unmoved by his pleas.

The Wheel wove as it would.

A long second passed, before Moridin stepped forward, freed from the Aiel girl's bonds of Air. His legs were a trifle unsteady, somewhat numbed still by the forkroot he had been forced to ingest, but his head was clearing. Most of that was due to that in horribly .. _personal .._ invasion perpetrated by the Malkieri queen. What _had_ she done?

 _I will mangle you, soul and body,_ he promised her, looking down at the pregnant woman where she lay on her side.

The thought felt … stilted. Mere force of habit rather than the barest expression of his rage. With a sense of dislocated numbness, Moridin realised the thought didn't match the distracted irritation he felt looking at the helpless woman .. what was her name again? Nynaeve. What had come over him?

A thrill of fear chased him. _Had they stilled him?_ No. Moridin could still see _saidin,_ golden bounty beckoning, elusive yet because of the residue of the brew in his bloodstream.

Judging from the swift recovery he was making, it could not be long – a minute or two, no more – before he could begin to use the Power. Not well, and not in any great quantities – not unless he wanted to chance burning the ability out of himself. Enough to wall himself within the cell with Air – _the irony of it! –_ whilst he recovered enough strength for a Gateway.

He looked down again at Lews Therin, feeling the familiar rage return undimmed. That was a relief. What would he be without his hate?

The Void's comforting, deathless stillness yet eluded him. A weapon as keen as _saidin_. Moridin eyed the sword at the Dragon's hip covetously. Without the _ko'di_ 's embrace, the blade was only half a weapon. Sometimes, you had to make do with what you had.

His graceful stoop to pluck the weapon from his fallen foe was arrested by the stout iron chain. Moridin didn't bother to test its strength. Unless _saidin_ came to him swiftly, he would be held fast. Long enough for Aes Sedai and Aiel wilders to come and shield him again.

Sweat ran down his back.

Trying to find the Oneness was disorienting. Frustrating. Even in the moments he briefly found purchase, it was like trying to stand upright upon black ice. A dozen times, he found his footing, only to fall hard upon his face.

Moridin could hear shouts, now. The thunder of running feet, pounding, clanking. Malkieri armsmen. And he marked another footfall, as at his thirteenth essay, he finally found his feet in the Void.

With the Oneness attenuating his senses, Moridin sensed the true danger. A soft, almost silent cadence, feet gliding, hardly touching the stone flags of the floor. A blademaster, in full flight. _The Leopard Courses._ Moridin could _feel_ the force ofthis man's intent, like a physical blow, presaging his onset. Focused. Determined. Dedicated.

He had seconds to free himself, or he would die where he stood.

Moridin found _saidin_ like a man blundering in the dark falling into an icy river. Seized a handful of threads of what he hoped were Fire, and shaped a crude knife. Brought it down blind upon the shackles that chained his wrists behind his back, and released the Power before the chaotic, rampant surges of the Power scoured him away.

The cell door burst open.

Moridin swept up _Justice_ from Rand al'Thor's hip, surging forward in Moon Rises Over Water. The steel-jacketed, bare-headed Malkieri soldier was too slow to the parry, and the Power-forged steel bit deep and true under the Borderlander's armpit.

With a choking cry, the soldier – he was dead, but didn't know it yet – fell back, and Moridin raised a bare foot, planting a hard side-kick into the centre of his breastplate, hurling him out into the corridor to carom off the far wall.

Moridin positioned himself optimally – not in the doorway, where he could be picked off by blows from either side – but a pace behind it. A place where they could only come at him one at a time, and he had the freedom to use his sword. And where the assailant would have to duck under the low door lintel to test his steel…

The next man swayed aside with the conviction of grace, avoiding the dying man-at-arms and the blinding spray of arterial blood jetting from his shoulder, flowing under the low lintel of the door in a raking low attack. _The River Undercuts the Bank._ Even anticipating the opening gambit, Moridin was taken aback by the tall blademaster's fluid speed.

Their blades bound. The man was old. Old like winter. Grim and grey. And he had a wrist of iron. He drove Moridin's blade aside in a shower of sparks, like a sword against the grindstone, trying to pinion the Forsaken's steel against the stone of the doorframe. Would have succeeded, but Moridin let his wrist flow like water, disengaging, forced to give a grudging pace.

The bare-chested man negotiated the bottleneck of the doorway in a sidelong stride to accommodate his broad-shouldered frame, taking the fight to the Betrayer of Hope.

Moridin was outmatched. He knew it from the impetuous onset. Death would find him at the blade of this stern old man. It might have been different, so very different, had his head not been clouded with forkroot, sapping his speed and leaving his body logy, unresponsive. Worse, the toxin restricted his knowledge of the Oneness to a casual handshake rather than lover's embrace.

 _It was what it was_ , Moridin told himself. He bared his teeth. Seeing the silvery marks of wounds honourably given on his adversary's robust, lean frame, he resolved to add one of his own. He could do that much. If he fought hard.

Moridin kept his blade low, inviting an attack in the high line. The cold-eyed Malkieri ghosted in, blade seeking his heart. Eschewing a parry, the Forsaken uncoiled like a striking blacklance from underfoot. _The Silverpike Leaps._ The blademaster – for the first time in the duel – was forced into a parry. _The Courtier Taps His Fan._

The Betrayer of Hope rolled his wrist. _The Grapevine Twines_ opening a shallow cut upon the other man's cheek. He felt a brief, savage elation. _First blood._

Nary a flicker of doubt showed in the other man's eyes. He took the wound – serene as ever, disengaged, ceded half a yard. Poised, despite the controlled fury of his assault. _Such cold eyes_.

This man was familiar, Moridin realised. He had something of the look of a man who had, for a time, been his tool. Luc. A graft of the Dark One's from two different trees. This man was somewhat alike, if nobler in bearing. A likeness carved enduring in granite.

Moridin raised his sword in brief salute to the King of Malkier, an enigmatic smile chasing his lips. They had taken each other's measure. The end was written, now.

Lan's eyes weighed Moridin, and the sword he carried. " _Justice_ has been long from you, Betrayer of Hope" he spoke, his deep voice a death-knell. "Yet it has found you in the end."

And here, at the end of hope, Moridin saw something he could use, as the King's eyes left his for the barest instant, falling in agony upon Nynaeve's still form where she lay. _Of course,_ Moridin realised. _Take her hostage. She is your way out of here…_

 _No._

He didn't have to molest her. He was free of the consuming need to kill. He could choose. Life, or Death. Not simply Death deferred, an addiction held at bay by the force of his will.

The clarity of the thought stilled his mind. A perfect moment of contemplation. _Saidin_ came in all its might, responding to his need. Moridin glanced meaningfully towards the helpless woman, showing Lan the subtle tells of his readiness to spring. In the same moment, he spun his web, not knowing what he wove, letting instinct guide him.

Death or Life?

Lan leapt, springing to interpose himself between the Forsaken and his wife.

And Moridin sprung his snare. Not Balefire or Lightning, or Fire. He could even, in that frozen instant, have cut out Lan's heart with his sword, as the King's desperate intervention left him momentarily vulnerable. He did not do that either. Nor did he subjugate his adversary with Compulsion.

Instead, Moridin wove Air, snapping the flows into being like a man cracking a whip, respecting the speed and clarity of thought of his erstwhile opponent.

Caught in invisible bonds, the face of the Malkieri king face showed fear for the first time. Fear mastered, and fear for another, not himself, but fear nonetheless. Another time, Moridin might have gloried in it. To bring such strength low. A high tower, crashing down.

Lan met his eyes, resolute rather than defiant with Nynaeve's life in the balance. "We are pledged against the Shadow," he spoke, a whisper that carried like a bannerman's cry. "From first cry to final breath. Every man, woman and child, and the very stones of Malkier itself. We cannot yield. So do what you must."

Moridin only nodded. Spoke the words that scraped his soul raw with their truth. "I hate both Dark and Light," he told the Man Alone. "I will never again serve the Shadow."

For the first time, Lan's eyes evinced surprise. "Hile, enemy," he replied, after grave contemplation.

There was no forgiveness in his gaze. There could not be. Not after this day, and all the days that had gone before. But there was a trace of acknowledgement. "Then may the Mother welcome you home. Soon. Your days have been too long upon the earth."

Moridin looked down, and saw something he had overlooked. Spilt from Rand's grasp, it lay on the floor. Inconsequential. Monumental. A dark promise. A thing he had thought lost, long coveted. The Ring of Tamyrlin.

He stooped. Picked it up. Felt the world – all the worlds – shudder. He closed his fist upon it.

 _This is mine._ Another truth.

He looked back at the Dragon Reborn. _One day,_ he promised, _we will have an accounting. For all our debts, old and new. But not today. Not like this._

Moridin wove a Gateway, behind him, and stepped backwards through it with infinite care, at the same moment loosing Lan from his bonds. He kept his sword out in readiness, the blade as much a part of him as the hand that held it, anticipating another attack from the Malkieri swordsman, as he allowed the portal to snap shut.

The Gateway refused to fully close, the empty air in front of him punctured by the tip of Lan's sword. With determined strength, the King of Malkier tried to pry the doorway open, the Power-wrought steel refusing to be cut by the sharp edge of the Gateway. Trying to come after him, to hew him down, whether he held the Power or no.

Brave. But unwise.

Once upon a time, Moridin would have mocked the man's risible effort. Let him come, if he would, and slay him cruelly beyond the threshold with the One Power.

Instead, Elan Morin deliberately cut his palm upon the point of Lan's sword, before gently pushing the blade back through the aperture with a pressure of Air, allowing his Gateway to close. An acknowledgement.

* * *

Nynaeve groaned, and the world swam. _Where am I?_ was her first thought, as she blinked fitfully, eyes crossing at the brightness of candle-light.

She found herself in Lan's arms. _A good start._ Bonds of steel that held her as gently as if she were Sea Folk porcelain. Then she remembered. _Oh Light! My child…._ Her hands went to her swollen belly, as her heart palpitated in sudden alarm.

Never had she been so relieved to feel her daughter kick. _Strong, and healthy._ It assuaged her fears, or at least held them in abeyance awhile. She would still not be able to be free of the anxiety that clenched her heart until she was Delved. And not by this talented firebrand of an Aiel child, but by a _real_ Aes Sedai…..

 _Nynaeve, get a grip!_ she chided herself. That must be the first time, ever, that she had been reduced to deferring to Aes Sedai expertise, in preference to turning to Wisdom-trained Healers like Egwene….!

 _Oh, Egwene._ A grief that never lost its power to surprise her. Time did not heal all. Old scars that Healing would not wash away. Nor would she wish it any different.

 _My little one,_ Nynaeve spoke to the daughter she bore. _I think I will name you Egwene. Would you like that?_ She was answered by a boisterous kick. _I guess that settles it. I'll just have to tell Lan._

It was good to be alive. She and Lan and little Egwene. She felt grateful. That was the best she could possibly have expected after being at Moridin's mercy. And Rand and young Shaiel, of course. What a cracking apprentice Wisdom that young lass would make! With the proper guidance, of course. A firm hand to settle her down…

Funnily enough, Nynaeve also felt the accustomed warm glow that spreads deep inside at the completion of an important task. Could she hope that her … Healing … had against all probability, worked?

Somehow, she cared, as deeply and desperately as she ever had that her Healing had taken on that rotten, blighted, bloody awful Forsaken as much as for the most innocent of her charges. _It must be my daughter,_ Nynaeve told herself, trying to dismiss the feeling as a megrim brought on by pregnancy. But the _rightness_ of the emotion remained. Stubborn as a Two Rivers briar.

Somehow the daunting thunderhead of dark might arrayed against them was streaked with grey, still turbulent and violent, but lessened. Changed. …

Lan frowned, brushing her hair back from her brow with a quizzical expression. "A penny for your thoughts, _mashaira._ "

"I'm afraid they aren't worth a ha'pennyworth, _carneira_ …. Oh. You seem to have cut yourself shaving, again. You have a perfectly decent straight-razor. Why you feel the need to use a Forsaken's sword is quite beyond me, I am sure. Good job I like my man rugged….."

"Wife, dearest.." Lan laughed gruffly, "I'm afraid you're babbling!"

Her eyes bulged in indignation. "I never…"

She was interrupted by a harrumph that was rather insistent. Not to mention a trifle embarrassed to boot. "Good to see you two are alive and well," Rand interjected impatiently. "But Moridin is gone, and he has taken the _sa'angreal_ with him. We – I – need to get after him, before the trail runs cold…."

"Rand," Nynaeve stopped him with an upraised palm. "Let him go. I have a feeling. Almost a Foretelling, telling me not to seek him out, or seek to reclaim the Ring. It is gone. You should be glad. Relieved. It was never meant for your hand."

To Rand's open-mouthed shock, Lan concurred. "I deem that man to be double-minded and dangerous. But he forswore the Shadow, here, when he had us at his mercy. And he spared our lives. Even you, whom he hates above all else.

I feel that other hands than ours guide the blade. One who oft chooses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise." Lan favoured Rand with a grim chuckle. "Just as unlikely, in its fashion, as a hay-haired Two Rivers farmboy becoming the man to seal the Dark One in his tomb.

Do not seek this man Elan Morin out." He paused for emphasis, before fixing Rand with the same direct, uncompromising look he had given him so often when they were master and pupil, all levity banished. "But, if he chooses to find you instead, kill him."


	50. Chapter 50: We Do Not Run

**Chapter 50: We Do Not Run**

It had been, Lan conceded, a trying day.

The King of Malkier sat upright, feeling his spine creak, giving the mounting heap of paper in front of him a weary look. Charts, maps and books covered every square inch of the table in front of him, illuminated by a candelabra bolted to the bookshelf above.

Not for the first time, Lan wished for a tilly-lamp. The soft, fuzzy glow from the beeswax candles was steady and clean, and their scent pleasant enough, but he feared his eyesight was being ruined.

Lan adjusted his reading-glasses – the lenses ground glass from Cairhienin artisans, a birthday-present from Nynaeve – and picked up the nearest book, a treatise on Seanchan tactics, from where it lay splayed face down, closing it and replacing it upon the bookshelf with a frown.

A thin volume, full of surmise and speculation. Not entirely unexpected. The Raven Empire tightly controlled the dissemination of information about their military. At the same time, they had a well-organised propaganda campaign, whose printing-presses extolled the virtues of the Seanchan Empire.

 _Ah well,_ Lan shrugged. _We still have Mat. And Tuon._ Still, one could never be over-prepared. There was no room for complacency. A lesson drummed into him from infancy.

Lan was aware of his limitations, as well as his advantages. He had been schooled extensively in the arts of war, had led armies in the Blood Snow and the running battle from the Borderlands to the final showdown in the Last Battle. But he was under no illusions as to his capabilities.

First and foremost, Lan was a sword. A competent commander, able to inspire men by his example, but no battlefield genius. Resolve would not be enough against the Seanchan. They, too, were disciplined and brave, extremely well-trained, and would be led by a great captain. A man of iron nerve, who could read the ebb and flow of battle like the thrust and counter of a single duel.

Lan's role was to be the Master of Horse, commanding seven thousand mounted Malkieri men-at-arms, plus whatever cavalry could be gleaned from the other Borderland nations and anyone else who came to their aid.

Overall leadership would fall to Mat Cauthon. Lan cracked a smile. It had been surprisingly easy to manipulate the legendary general into taking command. Nynaeve had shown him the way. "Don't encourage him," his wife had counselled. "And don't for the Light's sake try and twist his ear by telling him it's his duty. He'd just dig his heels in. Mat's obstinate that way. Just let him have his head. He'll help. As soon as he realises how badly we need him, and that nobody else has the necessary skills to pull our chestnuts out of the fire."

Lan had only grunted. Light, but that was the definition of a man who knew his duty, as far as he was concerned. For all of his offhand manner, Cauthon was a man you could count on. Reliable.

Lan would far rather put his trust in a fellow who would fight only when absolutely necessary, and then with the all-or-nothing ferocity of a baited bear, than any vainglorious fool who courted battle and glory. The former was the essence of Mat's fighting style, so far as Lan could fathom it, augmented with a surprisingly savage cunning and flair.

His son – their enemy – seemed to be the other sort of man who thrived upon war. Driven. Chillingly ruthless. A general from a hard school, who saw everything as part of the materiel of battle – including civilians. And yet, paradoxically, a man beloved by the soldiers he led. Who inspired and rewarded excellence. The kind of man who loved war. Who would never, ever stop. Not as long as there was an enemy out there, someone he could test himself against.

The worst kind of foe. Other than the Shadow itself.

Nynaeve had departed the Seven Towers earlier this morning, by Gateway to the White Tower, accompanied by a small retinue. His wife was visiting Tar Valon, not as Aes Sedai, but in her capacity as Queen of Malkier, She was going to entreat the Amyrlin Seat, Cadsuane Melaidhrin for the White Tower's aid.

Nynaeve had been fractious, even anxious, prior to their parting, which wasn't like her, but was unsurprising, considering the gravity of her mission. And the Light knew, she was charting dangerous waters.

To an Aes Sedai, with their long lives and eldritch powers, vested with the authority of the Tower White, kings and queens – even those of important and powerful lands like Andor and Tear – were ephemeral beings. Even in these times, with the Black Tower rising in parallel, rulers of the realms of men stepped lightly around an Aes Sedai, and all but gave fealty to the Amyrlin. The Queen of Malkier would have little authority or claim upon the White Tower, except for two things.

The first was a dangerous piece of knowledge, bequeathed to Lan by his former Aes Sedai, Moraine Damodred. Before it fell to the Blight, the Kingdom of Malkier had a compact with the Tower, which stipulated that the Aes Sedai would come to Malkier's aid against the Shadow, if called upon.

But when Malkier was assailed by unnumbered legions of Trollocs, Halfmen and Dreadlords, the White Tower had appeared to stand idly by. Not so much as a single Aes Sedai had fought beside the Malkieri in their hour of need. And so Malkier had been broken on the field, its cities and lands overrun. It had long been speculated that the Aes Sedai abandoned them to their plight.

The truth was, the Aes Sedai had sent a relieving force, riding in haste. All the strength the White Tower could spare. Hundreds of Aes Sedai and Warders, and a thousand Tower Guard – a rock upon which armies could founder, a force to give the Dark One himself pause.

However, by the time they reached the borders of Malkier, it was too late. There had been nothing left to save. So, the Aes Sedai had returned to the White Tower, and suppressed all knowledge of the attempt. Better to let men believe that for some reason of their own, the Tower chose to stand by than to admit to such a huge failure.

To the glacial mind of an Aes Sedai, it was better to be held faithless yet omniscient and powerful rather than impotent, short-sighted yet true of heart. This forbidden history was Sealed to the Tower. Known only by Aes Sedai. And now Lan.

In the hands of an Aes Sedai sufficiently motivated to help Malkier, this inconvenient truth was a lever that could move a mountain. An Aes Sedai such as Nynaeve.

The second matter was that Nynaeve – alongside the deceased Queen Elayne of Andor – was a quantity unknown for a thousand years. Since Queen Elisande of Manetheren. A reigning monarch who was also Aes Sedai. Although her rank bore little weight within Tar Valon, her strength and seniority amongst her Ajah did.

Nynaeve was a Sitter for the Yellow Ajah. And considering her contribution to the outcome of the Last Battle – fighting _Shai'tan_ in the pit of Shayol Ghul itself alongside the Dragon Reborn – she would have almost certainly have been the First Healer, the Yellow Ajah head. Except that her duties as Queen of Malkier kept her away from Tar Valon.

Her clout would give her the authority to treat with Cadsuane upon almost equal footing. The Amyrlin was a strong woman, respected but not loved overmuch by the Hall of the Tower…..

Lan would rather face a Fade or two than be in the vicinity of that particular confrontation, thank-you kindly!

He took his pipe from the table-top, feeling somewhat furtive as he thumbed some tabac into the bowl. Smoking indoors would catch him the very devil if Nynaeve was here, especially here in the Royal Library. Coming from a village where paper was precious, she treated the place with a reverence that Lan, to some extent, shared.

For his part, in the free time afforded him, Lan was working his way through the Tales of Jain Farstrider. Another Malkieri exile, Jain. A piquant memoir, he found it. Bittersweet. In his bantering tales, it was sometimes easy to forget that Jain had played the part of thief-catcher for one of Malkier's greatest traitors.

You could leave Malkier. Malkier would never leave you.

Lan turned his mind back to the task in hand. The fact was, they were badly outmatched in almost every department. _Tarmon Gai'don_ all over again, except on a smaller scale.

The Seanchan had the edge in numbers, in armour – his ponderous heavy cavalry would be up against not only their counterparts, but horse-archers, light lancers, and worse. _Grolm_ and _lopar._ He had witnessed first-hand the destruction they had wrought upon the forces of the Shadow.

The enemy also had something he had never encountered before. The _raken_ and _to'raken._ The closest analogue he had come up against were the Shadow's Draghkar, but those succubi were creatures of stealth and ambush, not a true airborne fighting-force.

The disparity in the infantry was worrying, to say the least. He had the best light infantry in the world, in the Aiel, but the Seanchan irregulars were very near as good, and they had men armed with muskets and other powder weapons, which outranged the short-bows of the Aiel.

He had nothing to oppose the Seanchan heavy infantry with. True, he could conscript a levy of Malkieri farmers, who would fight bravely and be slaughtered. _No._ It would be an unconscionable waste of their courage. The levy could hold the walls of the Seven Towers, far from the battle. He would rather offer unconditional surrender than throw untrained men into the abattoir.

The foe had hundreds of _damane._ He had a handful of Aes Sedai and a couple hundred Wise Ones. While he knew little about the Power, that was another mismatch. Without aid from the White Tower – or the Black – they could not hope to stand. In fact, unless Tar Valon sent a strong contingent of Aes Sedai, they were going to get butchered wholesale.

"How do we win?" he had asked Mat earlier.

Cauthon puffed out his cheeks. "We don't." he replied, bluntly. "Not in a single battle. We slip away. Harry them. Pick away at them until they're of a size with us. But we can't do that either. He has you in check. Either you face his army, or he slaughters your people, and the Aiel. You can't evacuate your citizens in the time you have left – not enough of them, anyway, even with Gateways."

"Your son. Would he make good on that threat?" Lan had asked, bracing himself for an outburst of anger at the calumny.

Light, but the hurt in Mat's eyes had been worse. Man didn't deserve that, no matter what his son had become. There was no helping it. He'd had to ask. Needed to know the nature of the man they faced.

Mat swallowed. "I hate to say it. But I reckon he might."

"A siege, then?" Lan suggested. "Draw everything back into the Seven Towers."

"Best of a short list of bad choices," Mat shrugged. "The walls won't stop him, not with his _damane._ But he won't be able to use his armour effectively inside the city, and he'll have to fight house-to-house, street by street.

We might be able to slow him down. Hold him for a week or so. But they've been doing this, all over Seandar, for years. Taking cities. They're good at it. Brutal. It's a death-sentence for anyone within the walls."

"That what you would do?" Lan, ever-pragmatic, felt obliged to ask. That had, after all, been the essence of his lifelong war against the Shadow. Fight, until you were dragged down. "A siege?"

"No." Mat replied, surprising the King. "A siege offers no hope of victory. It is death deferred. If we face Uthair upon the field, we _might_ win. And we will save more lives that way, for sure.

Not a campaign. A single, decisive battle. That's our best bet. Go big, or go home."

Lan stood up, pushing back his chair. _Marginal gains._ Could he find something he could use to even the odds somehow, no matter how incrementally?

There was something, a piece of information he had that had utility, he knew it. Could feel that itch inside his brain. Something not found in a dusty book, or on a map. Cauthon would pick the battleground, and if there was some weakness in the Seanchan, it would be the younger man who would see it first. With his past lives, leading armies in battle, if it was a matter of some abstruse tactic or long-forgotten gambit, the Raven Prince would be the first to divine it. But he, Lan, had something…

He sat on the floor. Crossed his legs, and assumed the _ko'di._ Emptiness came swiftly, and with it, emotion and care fell away. Responsibility, too. Duty. All that was left was the problem. Multifaceted. Interlocking wheels, like the lock on a strong-box. An equation. Parameters and variables. He couldn't solve the whole problem. But he could, perhaps, solve a particular case. Or simplify the formula.

 _Begin with what you have._ Malkieri heavy cavalry. Horsemen with lance, shortbow and sword. Slow but powerful, packing a heavy triple punch. Bows to thin the ranks of lightly-armoured foes. A nigh-irresistible charge. Great melee fighters, even against heavy infantry. But vulnerable to _lopar_ and _grolm_. A known quantity. No, Lan was missing something, but the answer did not lie with his banners of horse…

 _Forget the men you have, for now. Start afresh. As if you were beginning the campaign anew. The objectives are defined. Next, resources….. What do you have that you can't use? Begin there._

 _We have plenty of war gear, but not enough soldiers,_ Lan reflected. Haubergons of chain-mail, full fighting-suits of steel. Swords, mells, axes. Enough for hundreds of warriors. Inured to war, the Malkieri had learned that where injured men healed, and dead men could be replaced, war gear wore out, broke beyond repair.

The besieged nation spent surplus coin on buying the best armour and arms to lay up store for years of fighting, even as their own forges rang with the production of war gear. Malkier bought Tairen and Illianer steel, Andoran yew for bows and hundreds of bales of blackthorn for arrows.

Thanks to the foresight of the Nine Lords, the Seven Towers had vast, silent vaults, where rank upon rank of plate armour figures stood, inanimate golems waiting to awake.

Lan had walked amongst them. In the dark, in the cold, dry cellars, some long-ago quartermaster had opened boxes of rock salt, drawing the moisture from the air that otherwise would have rusted the armour and weapons into uselessness. The armour gleamed as if it had but newly come from the forge.

It was this storehouse that had tempted Lan to equip an untrained levy of heavily-armoured infantry. He might have done just that, if they faced the Last Battle, and gladly. But this was merely a conflict of nations.

Enough armour in reserve to equip five thousand men.

His thoughts turned to the Aiel. Doughty warriors, yes. Fleet, fast and fearless. Highly skilled with bow and spear. But not suited to soaking up punishment, surely.

Then he remembered. One of many battles, in the Blood Snow. An attempt to pincer a sizeable force of retreating Aiel between two forces of Borderland heavy cavalry. The plan had been to bind the Aiel into a scrimmage long enough for the slower-moving Tairen and Cairhienin heavy infantry to catch up and turn an Aiel reverse into a bloody defeat.

Easier said than done. What made fighting the Aiel frustrating was that _Aiel_ victories were often complete, but their defeats were rarely so.

Anyway. What made this battle important was that the ambush had been a partial success. The main body of the Aiel broke away from the engagement cleanly, heading in the general direction of Dragonmount at a fair clip. In sufficient numbers and at a fast-enough pace to make pursuit a fool's game. Many such chases ended in a straggling, running fight, with the pursuers ending as prey, often as not.

What had enabled the main body to make their withdrawal was the sacrifice of a thousand Aiel men. Men, not a Maiden amongst them. They had stood and fought, and not taken a backwards step until they were overrun and cut down.

Lan had noted that this contingent had fought as a body, disciplined, shield to shield, and more surprisingly, that some had even appropriated light Wetland armour – chainmail hoods for example – enabling them to soak up punishment as well as dishing it out. A trade-off of some mobility for staying-power.

Afterwards, when it was done, Lan walked among the bodies. There had been a dying Aiel, pierced by many arrows. He had looked at Lan with resignation in his eyes, face pale and bloodless. He knew Death was close.

"I know you." he had spoken, in a blood-clogged voice.

"Hush," Lan had muttered, absently. Those Aiel were supposed to be Darkfriends, or so he had been told at the time. He hadn't believed it by then.

Lan thought of offering the man water from his skin, and reluctantly relinquished the idea. A good way to get a spear in the ribs, that.

The man's eyes refused to leave his, holding him there. "You fought well. With honour" Lan told him, feeling he owed the man something.

Green eyes glowed with the fire of pride. "We are the Stone Dogs, wetlander" the Aiel told him. "We do not run."

 _We do not run._ That had sounded like a catechism to Lan.

At the time, it had been one moment, of no particular significance. A heartbeat's pause in between a bruising sequence of battles towards the end of the conflict. Back then, Lan had no knowledge of the Aiel warrior societies – excepting the Maidens, from pedlar's tales. He had noted the adoption of Wetland armour, but not seeing the like again, he had put it down to a failed experiment by the Aiel to augment their already deadly arsenal.

Now he knew better. The Stone Dogs were a warrior society, who pledged to never run from a fight. Their primary role was to cover the rear of a clan's retreat in an hour of great need. Their deployment meant the Aiel planned to fight to the bloody finish. They seemed, by and large to be drawn from the biggest, strongest physical specimens of Aiel manhood. And, Lan guessed, their training would emphasise close-order drill.

Assuming the warrior societies were split roughly evenly, excepting the Maidens, who would have a significant majority over any one of the male-only societies… there should be somewhere between five and seven thousand Stone Dogs.

Lan allowed himself a smile, like a chink of light creeping under a shut door.

There was a knock on the door, interrupting his reverie. It was a soldier, one of the old ones. A man who would have been about the age of Bukuma, if he were still alive. Lan hadn't the heart to pension his veterans off, though by rights, he should. Instead, he chose them to guard his personal quarters in the Seven Towers. A position of honour, and far from peril. And should danger come unawares – well, these men had made it through the fall of Malkier and the Last Battle.

The white-haired carle bowed deeply, hand on his sword-hilt. A mark of respect, his subordinate acknowledging the threat posed by his commanding officer.

It warmed Lan's heart to see the old ways observed. Southrons wouldn't understand. By and large, they hadn't had time to become acquainted with certain realities. The Shadow could corrupt _anyone_. No matter his rank, no matter how noble his line. That he himself, Diademed King of Malkier as he was, had not been foresworn was due to the Light's grace, as much if not more so than his own effort. His father's brother, and his cousin had not been so fortunate.

" _Dai_ _Shan,"_ Emrin addressed him. "There is a … an Aiel without. A clan chief, or so he says, by the name of Ronam, son of Rhuarc. Shall I show him in."

Lan heard the slight hesitation, and the words left unsaid. _Black-veiled_. Suppressed a sigh. There was a certain amount of bad blood, only to be expected from mutual antagonists of the Aiel War. "Show him in, Emrin, if you would." Lan replied.

Ronam strolled into the room, ducking under the door lintel. Lan appraised him with the intent of a general considering a fortress he might one day have to besiege.

Seated, or standing, you were aware of Ronam's sheer size, his bulk. A strong man, who looked as if you could crack boulders off his torso. When he walked, that was when you saw his grace. All that power, in motion, he moved with a restless, elastic energy, his frame no longer ponderous but rangy. Purposeful. He gave Lan a friendly enough nod, clan chief to clan chief, but nary the hint of a smile.

Emrin had divested the warrior of his spears, buckler and assorted knives. To Lan, the weapons seemed like a cosmetic afterthought to this man. Without them, Ronam looked about as harmless as a grizzly bear.

Lan rose to greet him, stepping toward him, conscious the Aiel overtopped him by a head. "It is good to see you, Ronam," he began, knowing the Aiel favoured plain speech. "Let's talk. Shall I send Emrin to bring you food? Something to drink, perhaps."

"Maybe later, _Aan'allein_ , with thanks" the giant rumbled, in a mellow baritone. "I wished to hear, with my own ears, how things were progressing."

 _Without a Wise One looking over your shoulder,_ Lan guessed. "Well, Ronam, to be straight with you, it looks like the kind of fight we ought to avoid. Unfortunately, we can't."

"That kind" Ronam growled his understanding. "The sort where you wake from the dream. Aye. Well, all dreams end. This one has been mighty fine, but if it can't be helped…"

"We'll all do what we can." Lan promised. "But now, I have something to show you. A legacy, if you will. Something which might help in the dance of spears."

"What is it?" Ronam asked. His face, giving away little, betrayed much. Suspicion of wetlanders – even _Aan'allein_ – was ingrained in the Aiel psyche.

Still, Ronam suffered Lan – accompanied by Emrin, bearing a lighted brand – as he led them deep into the bowels of the ancient fastness. Lan stopped at a nondescript iron door, and knocked upon it.

With not a word spoken, the door was retracted smoothly into the ceiling, almost noiselessly, the workings newly oiled and greased. The light of the torch penetrated the darkness, reflecting the gleam of burnished metal.

Ronam stared at the seemingly endless rows of armour in fascination, rapping his knuckles off a breastplate thoughtfully. "Wetlander armour. I don't understand, _Aan'allein._ "

Lan outlined his proposal to the Taardad clan chief, who rubbed his square beard contemplatively. "You know, Lan," he responded, the quiet thunder of his voice setting up a tinny echo in the vault, "I once entertained a Sea Folk delegation at my hold… Well, the Wise Ones did, but you know. I was there.

The Sea Folk brought some delicacies along with the guest-gift. Fruits of the sea. There is a creature they showed me, I think it is called a lobster." Ronam's hand opened and closed, in imitation of the crab's claw. "Alive, before they prepared it for cooking. These suits remind me of that animal. Crustacean." he amended. "A clumsy thing, but well-protected.

I thank you for your offer, Lan, but I have seen wetland men, lumbering about to no purpose in these things. Easy prey for our spears. They only appear to be of some use from the back of a horse. I don't think they would serve us."

"Perhaps" Lan said, meaningfully, "their clumsiness is because those men were half-trained wetlanders. Not Aiel. Or Borderland men. I myself have fought in armour, from the saddle and on foot. I choose to I battle, where I can. Tell me, did I seem unduly encumbered?" Softly. Like silk upon steel.

"All men know that you are a great warrior," Ronam replied mildly, "and I offer no offense, _Aan'allein_. But you are an exceptional man. Not just another spear-brother. I have misgivings that another could do half so well borne down by all that weight."

"Perhaps" Lan suggested, "you could try it on yourself. By way of an experiment. I found a fine Illianer coat that was made for a man your size. Maybe a little tight in the shoulders" Lan allowed. "Nothing a blacksmisth couldn't fettle for you, though."

Ronam gave Lan a flat look. "If this turns out to be an example of Wetland humour, at my expense, you are going to need that sword of yours. And not just to pick your teeth with, either." _Wetland humour?_ Lan thought. _What about the Aiel sort?_ For the life of him, Lan couldn't tell if Ronam was speaking in jest, or deadly earnest. Perhaps they were one and the same to him.

"Look at my face, Aiel" Lan replied, patiently. "Do I look like I am renowned for my sense of humour?"

Ronam rumbled laughter, clapping Lan on the shoulder with a heavy hand. "Then lead on, my friend."

Lan began, directing Ronam's attention to a shield of silvered steel. "Similar to the buckler shield your Aiel prefer, but made from durable Tairen steel. Have a look."

Ronam smiled cavernously. "Hold it up in the light, _Aan'allen._ At your head height. And brace yourself."

The King took the shield in a tight grip, both hands upon the rim, setting his feet.

Ronam thundered a heavy right-handed punch into the centre of the shield, a punch that would have given a charging _grolm_ pause.

Lan staggered under the impetus, reeling backwards a couple of paces. "Let's have a look at this shield of yours now" Ronam demanded, confident it would have been crumpled under the weight of the strike.

The surface of the shield remained resolutely concave. Ronam whistled appreciatively through his teeth. "There's an elasticity in good steel," Lan told him. "The force of the blow is dissipated across the whole shield, not just at the point of impact. You can use this shield for more than just parrying. A rabbit-blow to the back of the neck will kill." Lan demonstrated, a chopping blow with the targe's inner edge. "And, as you have seen, it can withstand a forceful blow."

"The shield, I like" Ronam muttered, taking it from Lan's hands into his own shovel-like palms for a closer inspection. "Light, too. Not what I expected."

"I've got five thousand just like it." Lan informed him "Some bigger box shields too, if you want them, but you know as well as I that it's better to fight with what you know."

Lan coaxed Ronam into the armour, acting as his squire, efficiently lacing up the suit. Soon, the imposing Aiel was encased in his articulated armour, a steel paladin. His voice came muffled through his lowered visor. "Can't see a lot. Not unless I jerk my head from side to side like a pecking hen. That's no good."

"You can fight with the visor up," Lan told him. "I prefer that, myself. What you can't see, you cannot kill."

Ronam raised the visor. "It's surprisingly light" he commented, rolling his shoulders. "Didn't expect that. Thought it'd be like carrying a blacksmith and his forge on my back."

"Move around in it" Lan ordered him. "Get a feel for it."

The Taardad warrior obediently stalked about, suit clanking ominously in the half-light. He swung his arms, bounced on his heels, accustoming himself to the constraints of the armour. With an exuberant whoop, he leapt high in the air, kicking out his leg.

Lan grinned. He had watched Aiel do this for sport. Higher and higher, first one leg then the other, until they were turning somersaults. He had no idea if it was possible to perform such a stunt in full plate of proof. He had never tried, himself. _You can be a dour man, Lan Mandragoran._

With a great leap, Ronam launched himself into the air, his massive frame encased in its steel carapace as graceful as a sporting salmon as his back arched. Lan winced. _I really hope he gets it right,_ Lan prayed. _It might be a bit of a tricky situation, explaining how the Taardad clan chief ended up with a broken neck…._

Over he went, landing lithely on his feet, as if the issue was never in any doubt. Lan heaved a great sigh of relief. "I'm a beautiful man!" the Taardad chief boasted, with a deep laugh indicating he was being facile. "Or so my sister-wives tell me."

Lan grinned. "Well, I've learned that it doesn't pay to argue with wives. Ever. About anything. How do you like the armour?"

"There's only one more test" Ronam chuckled. "And I have a feeling that you're going to enjoy it more than me. I want you to hit me. With that." He indicated a blacksmith's forge hammer, leaning idle against the wall.

"Rather you than me, Ronam. Brace yourself." Lan warned as he hefted the long-handled implement. The unwieldy forge hammer was no weapon – not unless you were Perrin Aybara, or maybe Ronam himself. The balance was all wrong. Unwieldy.

Lan was well-accustomed to wielding an axe to cut wood. Good exercise. His long arms and robust frame were suited to generating power. More power than one usually required with the sword. He swept the hammer up, liking the dark potential of the penduluming mass at the apex of its swing. Ronam was right. He would have to test the armour for real, after so long unused.

"Hit me, little man" Ronam grunted, jutting out his chin defiantly.

 _Asking_ for it, by the Light!

"MALKIER!" Lan bellowed, putting his back into the stroke, aiming for the centre of Ronam's breastplate. He swung true, as hard as he had ever hit anything in his life, pouring all his anxiety into a single cathartic stroke.

The armour rang like a bell. Ronam was lifted from his feet. He crashed into the racks of armour, ploughing through them to land on the flat of his back.

Lan rushed to his side, fearing the worst.

Ronam pushed up the visor, which had fallen to cover his face. He was chuckling.

Of course he was.

"You hit like a drunken Ogier, I'll give you that" Ronam confided, as he sat up, and took Lan's proffered hand, as with an effort, Lan hauled him to his feet. "I definitely like the armour a lot better now."

"Tell me something" Lan asked the Taardad chief. "Are you a Stone Dog, by any chance?"

"Indeed I am," Ronam replied, with a straight face. "However did you guess?"

Lan turned serious. "Well, we won't be able to run from this fight, even if running was an option." he told Ronam, gravely. "At some point, it's going to be a matter of standing your ground, taking everything that's thrown at you. For as long as it takes. With that in mind, do you think your society could find a use for some five thousand suits of armour, and the same number of steel bucklers?"

"The Maidens will make jokes about us from here till the end of the bloody world" Ronam grumbled. "But at least, with a bit of luck and these lobster-suits, they'll be there to make those jokes. Aye, we'll take them, with our thanks."


	51. Chapter 51: A Fair Judgement

**Chapter 51: A Fair Judgement Is Served**

The winter sky held the brittle temper of wrought iron. The air Aviendha breathed was cold enough to scald her lungs, fogging the air in a warm miasma as she exhaled. The Wise One paid either little mind. That did not mean she was unaware of them, nor of a hundred other minutiae. No Aiel woman worth her salt would. Attention to the little things was often the difference between life and death.

She walked among the tents of her people, a gigantic, nameless hold sprawling across the wide valley-bed, a grassless plain bordered by gentle hillocks whose treeless scree slopes afforded some shelter from Borderland storm winds.

Spear-brothers and Maidens made way before her purposeful stride, her halt gait – the mark of an old wound taken in battle – no cause for shame. Each step she took on the unforgiving ground was another reminder of what had passed and where she was. _Exactly where she needed to be._

The tamped ceramic underfoot could never be mistaken for the shifting sands of the Three-Fold Land. Malkier might be a sterile place, but it was still the Wetlands, its dense clay soil heavily impregnated with water, and the muddy creek below brimming. An unimaginable surfeit of riches to one born in the arid peaks of the Nine Valleys. Enough water to sustain an entire clan and its herds.

The tent-city was in the process of being disassembled, an army of _gai'shain,_ children and folk too old to meaningfully wield a spear pulling down tents, rolling the goatskin tent-covers into tightly-packed bundles, securing bales of tent-poles with leather thongs for easy transportation.

The people laboured at their tasks with a quiet, resigned stoicism which made a marked contrast to the usual good-humoured banter of working folk engaged in a pleasant and undemanding task. Most of the equipment would have to be carried by hand, Aviendha knew. There were all too few pack-animals. That should not matter.

Despite the formidable logistics of uprooting an entire clan, they would not be going far. A journey of a single day, for the most part, but Aviendha felt a wrench in her heart, knowing that the Gateways that would open to disparate locations in the Three-Fold Land and to Shienar, Kandor and Arafel, as well as within the walls of the Seven Towers here in Malkier would once again sunder her clan to the four winds, the septs relocating to safety.

An abiding sadness. They would withdraw deep into the desert, forsaking old fastnesses such as Cold Rocks Hold, whose location was compromised, known to the Seanchan and the Sharans.

The Aiel put little trust in the false security of walls. Their best defence was the uncharted tracts of the open desert. The surest buckler the hearts of brave men.

It would mainly be the young and the old and infirm that would be leaving, along with a leavening of the _algai'd'siswai_ for protection. Malkier had been kind to the Taardad, in the intervening twenty years after the holocaust of _Tarmon Gai'don,_ and their numbers had increased.

The clan had sent fifteen thousand spears with Rand to _Al'cair Dal,_ pending his election as _Car'a'carn_ , and a full fifty thousand warriorsto the Last Battle. In the current crisis, the Taardad could afford to send five thousand hale fighters to protect the refugees – mostly inexperienced younglings – leaving some thirty-five thousand veteran spears to stand against the wrath of the Seanchan, together with four hundred Wise Ones.

Aviendha's eye caught an elderly _gai'shain_ sitting cross-legged upon the ground, a picture of stillness contrasting the efficient work going on about him.

The Wise One frowned, taking a closer look at the white-robed man. There was a pile of sand at his left hand and at his right, and the fellow was transferring the sand, grain by grain, to the heap on the right. Useless labour. _Shaming_ labour, as the man's sun-whetted face attested.

"Who set you to this task, and why?" Aviendha demanded of him. Light, but this was no time for such foolishness! Her ire was principally reserved for those who had put him to the work, whatever fault the _gai'shain_ had committed. Either put the man in the black of a _da'tsang_ if his transgression was great, or give him a strapping for lesser errata! "Tell me. Exactly. In the very words they used."

"If it please the Wise One," the _gai'shain_ spoke, mildly enough, raising his eyes to the Wise One, addressing her with a look that lay somewhere between meek and strained. A familiar face, Aviendha noted with surprise – the Shaido, Muradin. "The warrior who took this one's oath – Jarrad – set me to this chore. A punishment for being 'a Shaido dogrobber who spilt my tea', or so he said." Muradin informed her, tightness in his eyes more voluble than words, expressing his discomfort at repeating the slight upon his clan.

Aviendha felt a trace of sympathy for him. There were those who found a _gai'shain_ 's meekness a hard yoke to bear. She herself would have been one such, she feared, during her days as a Maiden of the Spear. Happily, such a thing had never come to pass.

"Spilling a man's tea," Aviendha mused, her face inscrutably opaque, "is a quite regrettable waste of water. Don't do it again. As for the other thing, being born a Shaido is a misfortune, perhaps, but a cause for punishment it is not.

Tell this Jarrad," she instructed Muradin, tightly, "to come and see me – Aviendha, Wise One of the Nine Valleys sept – at his earliest convenience. And to bring a stout stick with him, for his enlightenment. As for you, Muradin, there will be time later for sifting sand, if it please the Light. For now, make yourself useful, and help pack these tents."

Aviendha watched Muradin conceal a radiant smile under a _gai'shain_ 's dutiful placidity, like a Wetland merchant pocketing a gold coin. "At once, Wise One. Gratitude!"

She turned to him, with just a hint of frown. "Are you still here, _gai'shain_? Hop to it!"

Aviendha turned away – five minutes of a Wise One's time was precious, and she had spent too long already on the matter, though there was an undeniable pleasure to be found in putting an irksome matter, however small, to rights – and set off once again, hurrying but not running. Wise Ones didn't run. Irritation inside kept her like a kettle on the boil.

A myriad of matters required her attention. She needed to liase with Wise Ones from the Miadi and Four Stones septs regarding a location for temporary holds in the Three-Fold Lands – water being at a premium in the former's traditional lands. Aviendha hoped that the Four Stones might be induced to allocate them a suitable tract on a temporary basis. It wasn't a given, by any means – the kind of flashpoint that could spark a blood-feud if it wasn't handled with sensitivity.

Then she needed to meet Faile ni'Bashere ti Aybara in her capacity as Queen of Saldea. A woman of uncommon courage and a rare temper to match it. Aviendha needed to remind her – tactfully, of course – of her commitment to the Dragon's Peace. Ten thousand Saldean lancers would come in handy in the dance of the spears…

If that wasn't enough, Shaiel had chosen now, of all times, to play truant. When she caught up with her daughter, they were going to be having words….!

Overlaying it all, grief restrained. A goad to her spirit, and a weight breaking her back. Aviendha acknowledged it, without being ruled by it. There would be a time to mourn Elayne, but not yet.

The part of her that was _ji_ demanded vengeance. A claim upon her barely restrained by her _toh_ , a duty written into her bones. As it should be. Aviendha knew her place, the thing a Wetland soldier might call keeping his watch and warrant. She was there, at her post, doing what needed to be done. Keeping faith. The women who came before, from _Shadar Nor_ on, would expect no less of her.

Aviendha ducked under the awning of the large sweat-tent which was the principal place where Wise Ones conducted business. Taking precedence over all these other claims upon her time, she had to meet with the Wise Ones and clan chiefs of the other major clans. But before that, there was another matter that required her attention first.

Her eyes adjusting to the gloom within the large marquee, Aviendha flashed the other woman a harried smile as she divested herself of her clothing with the quick, efficient movements of unselfconscious habituation.

Hagal was a small woman, a little dumpy, in her late middle years. Ordinary in almost every way, except for the warm, grandmotherly wistfulness in her eyes, the crinkle of laughter-lines written into her testament to a life spent in good-humoured service to others. Aviendha knew the Chareen Wise One only in passing, but liked her well from what little she did know. _A great pity, then,_ the younger woman mused, sadly.

Hagal rubbed her hands together briskly, eagerly, as Aviendha sat down. The older woman had a sparrow-like impatience to her, her hallmark. An impatience to get on with the task at hand, all too aware of how brief, how fleeting life was. She gave Aviendha a sidelong look – she really was birdlike – inclining her head towards the younger woman inquisitively before favouring her with a warm smile, steepling her hands in front of her to arrest their fidgety motion.

Hagal's shrewd gaze never left her face, giving Aviendha her full attention. A teacher with a student. A counsellor with a patient. _Talk to me,_ those faded blue eyes urged. _Lay your burdens down._

Aviendha's fixed smile slipped just a hair.

"Tea?" the older woman offered, with a sympathetic half-smile. The _gai'shain_ was half-way to Aviendha before she had even finished nodding, the white-cowled woman briskly efficient, handing the younger woman a cup, as Hagal deftly plucked the other cup from the tray with her right hand, not waiting upon the _gai'shain._

Aviendha snagged a couple of brown sugar-cubes from the saucer – she had a sweet tooth yet – and ground the lump against the bottom of her cup with her spoon before taking a tentative sip. She barely tasted the tea – some Seanchan confection, a stew of flavours, strongly spiced, steeped in hot milk. Not to her taste. She preferred the stuff from the Sharan trade convoys, tart bitter blends, not this unfamiliar, cloying richness.

* * *

Hessalam watched Aviendha sip the tea as they shared a moment of companionable silence. In the intimate setting, the younger woman displayed an endearing, artless lack of grace, her long-limbed frame angular, all elbows and knees. She took a measured sip of her own, the smoky _chai_ perfectly potable. A passable blend.

It was interesting to see what had endured from the Age of Legends, from an anthropological standpoint. What things had flourished, and what stagnated since the Breaking. The world had moved on, changing for the most part for the worse. These people could not cultivate a decent wine, but their tea and _kaf_ were more than acceptable. Yet her own time, the epoch of civilization – for all its vaunted art and sculpture – could not boast any beauty to rival peerless Aviendha.

She drank in her beloved as they talked briefly of things inconsequential to her, but of great moment to Aviendha. The comings and goings amongst these savages and the other nations, their preparations for imminent flight, and battle.

Hessalam was well-prepared for Aviendha's questions. The dead Hagal, under the duress of Compulsion, had been instructive, and Hessalam had learned the rest of what she required from other Wise Ones, and from keeping her ears and eyes open. There were no secrets for one such as her, used as she was to the dissembling ways of Ishamael, Sermirhage and Rahvin, and the cold-eyed, closed-mouthed Demandred. Compared to the Chosen, the taciturn Aiel were an open book.

"And what of Sorah? Is she ready to be tested, or does she need more time?"

Aviendha's question threw Graendal momentarily – they had just finished discussing handling Faile Aybara. Why discuss the raising of apprentices?

It wasn't just the nature of the question that had jolted her. It was the offhanded manner with which it had been asked. Apparent unconcern in a naïve attempt to mask the fact that – for whatever reason – this query held some deeper import to Aviendha.

Hessalam recovered after the briefest hesitation, covering the pause by taking a fortifying gulp of tea hot enough to scald. "Who? Oh yes, the matter had slipped my mind entirely. But with all due respect, this is hardly the time to discuss a Testing, Aviendha…"

"No, it is not," replied Aviendha. There was unguarded fury blazing in her eyes. A wildfire, finding dry kindling in a sudden blaze. "But then, what woman would forget the name of her own _daughter_ , however briefly? Not to mention the fact that the girl is but newly 'prenticed, far from ready to assume the mantle of a Wise One.

A Wise One of the experience of Hagal would not make such mistakes. But then, you are not Hagal … are you?" Aviendha accused, springing to her feet, fists clenched by her sides angrily.

Hessalam affected consternation, inflecting her voice with all the hurt and indignation of the unjustly aggrieved as she set her cup down with a bang on the small table beside her. "My dear girl, I haven't the faintest _clue_ what you're talking about, but if you imagine for one moment I'm going to stand for your baseless insinuations, impugning my honour, you've another think coming!.."

"Enough!" Aviendha shouted. "Enough already! Enough lies!" She jabbed a finger at Hessalam. "Too long have you dogged my steps. Too long have I felt your gaze soiling me, as if you imagined we were pillow-friends. I see all!

But you made a big mistake. Letting me come close enough to sense the ability in you." For the first time, Hessalam's motherly mask slipped a little, showing Aviendha an unwelcome glimpse at the covetousness and calculation beneath as the Forsaken sought to comprehend her meaning. "Not all Wise Ones channel, Shadowrunner. Not all Aiel who channel are Wise Ones. Hagal was one of the few amongst us who could not. She was not born with the ability.

But you aren't just an ordinary Darkfriend, are you?" Aviendha continued, in a more measured tone. "You are _her_ , aren't you? The woman I fought at Shayol Ghul. The Shadow-Weaver who was caught in her own web. One of the Shadowsouled. _Graendal._ " Aviendha spat her name in her face with revulsion. "One whose true face is as ugly as her sins. The time of reckoning has come for the lives you have marred. The people you have slain. For Rhuarc and so many others. Put off this visage you have appropriated, the likeness of a good and decent woman, and _face me._ "

Slowly, Hessalam uncoiled, rising to her feet with the lazy assurance of a basking cobra opening her hood. Vaunting in who and what she was. "Very well, Aviendha. The time for deception is past. Once, indeed, I bore the name Graendal. Now, I am known as _Hessalam_."

The woman seemed to increase in malice to Aviendha's gaze, to cast a long finger of shadow over Aviendha that chilled her heart. "I am Unforgiveness itself to my enemies. But I hope to show a different heart to those I claim in love, body and soul." Hessalam's smile was a thing of unclean hunger. "You will come with me, to learn my love."

Aviendha shook off her fear and disgust. Her voice was cold as she answered the Forsaken. "I think not, _Hessalam._ Try and seize the One Power, unclean one. There was forkroot in your tea. A simple thing. But effective. Perhaps you can feel it at work in your numbed limbs already, your brain fogging as the herb does its work."

The only answer the Shadowsouled offered was a chilling smile that sent shivers down the Aiel woman's spine. Aviendha froze like a rabbit, caught in a predator's gaze as the air around the Forsaken appeared to blaze with the solar flare of Hessalam embracing _saidar_. A vast strength, eclipsing Aviendha's own.

At the same time, the Wise One became uncomfortably aware of lethargy stealing over her, sapping her will even as it drained the strength from her limbs. She staggered, dizzied, the light appearing to wax and wane, as she sought to fight the intoxication, her fingers scrabbling for the belt-knife at her side. She felt she was drowning, her heavy limbs finding the resistance of quicksand.

Graendal's strong fingers arrested her sluggish attempts to draw steel. Clutching her wrist with a surprising strength, a steel fist in a velvet glove.

"Easy, my love," Hessalam crooned. "Gently now, my dove." Aviendha found herself as helpless as a babe in arms, unable to resist as the Shadowsouled plucked her knife from her side, tossing it aside with a sniff of distaste.

"You won't need these trifles" Graendal told her, with a terrible assurance, as Aviendha's knees buckled. The Forsaken caught Aviendha as she sagged into her arms with an almost solicitous care, lowering her to the ground.

With an effort, Aviendha sluggishly turned her head, eyes finding the blank countenance of the _gai'shain._ Watching this obscenity unfold, wordless and still. Obvious, now, to her even with forkroot fogging her mind.

Hessalam confirmed her worst fears. "Your _gai'shain_ told me all I needed to know, given the proper inducement. A touch of Compulsion to make her divulge your rather .. transparent .. attempt at entrapment. A dab more to make her switch your cup for mine. And so, here we are." Graendal's twisted smile encompassed her satisfaction for a trick well played, seasoned with a moué of pity for Aviendha's failed gambit.

"You do not" Aviendha forced out, her tongue thick with intoxication, "know as much as you think, _da'tsang._ " There was a cat's viciousness in her green jade eyes now, Hessalam saw, with sudden unease. And triumph.

The Forsaken felt the glow of a dozen women seizing the Power, outside the tent, where they had stalked their dangerous prey on stealthy feet. No, not seizing. _Unveiling._

The shield that cut Hessalam from the Source fell in that same frozen moment, like a surgeon's knife, keen and sure, wielded by such a strong hand that it severed the connection between her and _saidar_ without even a faint tug of resistance. _Thirteen._ A prime circle, led by a woman of experience to direct the flows.

Desperately, Graendal scrabbled at the transparent barrier that walled her off from the life-giving essence of the One Power.

Useless. She was as helpless as a microbe, trapped between a pair of microscope slides, her essence laid bare to the lens above. Without agency or strength. Still, Hessalam fought the rising tide of panic, fought to find some purchase on the slick meniscus of the shield. Hoping against hope for an unguarded moment from her captors. Anything…

Her eyes fell upon Aviendha in a wordless plea. The Aiel woman shook her head.

"Only a fool relies upon one plan," she told Hessalam. "The women who hold you captive will remain without, where you cannot affect them by any wile or stratagem." Aviendha raised her voice, authoritatively to the Wise Ones outside. "Bind her. And gag her."

Hessalam flinched as she was roughly seized in flows of Air that wrapped her from head to toe. A thick flow forced itself into her mouth, spreading to form a seal. Her breathing became anxious, shallow, through her nostrils. _Helpless._ The indignity was one thing, but it paled against the immediacy of Hessalam's fear, her heart beating as if it was trying to escape from her chest.

Aviendha was regaining her faculties, pushing herself unsteadily to her feet. Sadness was etched upon her fine features. "I should have foreseen that you would use Compulsion upon my _gai'shain._ That is my fault, for not considering you capable of _any_ heinous act, even against those bonded to peace by honour."

The Wise One regarded her forbiddingly. "I think – I _hope_ – that a Compulsion subtle enough to evade detection at close-quarters should prove insufficient to effect permanent damage upon this young woman's mind.

She will, however," continued Aviendha implacably, "be the last person to suffer from your malice. You are beyond honour. Void of any species of integrity." Aviendha pronounced, a judge passing sentence, voice ringing in declamation. "Too dangerous even to suffer the living death of a _da'tsang_ 's life.

Hessalam _Treekiller,_ woman of no conscience, you shall be taken from here by Gateway to the deep desert of the Three-Fold Land, many days from any living thing.

There, you shall be stripped, and your clothing and all possessions – everything you have soiled with your touch – burned with the Power, and the ashes scattered. Then, you shall be stilled. Only then will you be abandoned until thirst claims the life from your body, and your body's polluted water is lost uselessly to the sands, where it will not grow a living thing."

 _No!_ Hessalam screamed within her mind, the gag of Air preventing her lips from even shaping the words she wanted to utter, as stone-eyed Wise Ones filed into the tent to take her into custody.

It was to her Beloved that Graendal's beseeching gaze turned in desperation at the last. _Do not cast me out to die, alone, far from you._ But Aviendha's face was set, the fabulous malachite striations of her eyes, so expressive, etched with a contempt and hatred as bitter as the metallic taste of blood in Hessalam's mouth. The burnt tang of copper, Aviendha's hair as she turned away in disgust, forsaking the Forsaken.

 _Act in haste,_ some long-forgotten voice mocked Hessalam, _repent at leisure._

As the Gateway opened, radiating the heat of the desert into the cold recesses of the tent, the Forsaken knew with absolute certainty that she had come to the end of her path. Hessalam would end where she had been reforged, under the scalding sun that she feared above all else.

There she would die by the inch. Racked on the amber embers of that glowing furnace. Cracking, blistering, peeling, being divested of all she was. Sloughing off all the trappings of consciousness until all that remained was animal anguish and mortal fear.

 _Repent at leisure._

Hessalam's last memory – long after she had forgotten even her own name – would not be the water she craved, but Aviendha's face. Observing her suffering with all the fascinated revulsion reserved for watching a wasp drown itself in honey.


	52. Chapter 52: Gholam

**Chapter 52: Gholam**

It was as black as the Ways.

The steady blue light from the ball of _saidar_ suspended above the Spider's open palm was cold comfort in the catacombs. Outside the shelter of the rays it cast, shades congregated. The labyrinthine writhe of the mineshaft baffled the sound of her orphan footfalls.

Silence had been here too long. A silence that grudged her life. A silence that would remain long after she had departed.

The air tasted used. Spoiled. Bitter and brackish. The miners who had delved here first, following the veins of silver into the mountainside, working by the light of tallow candles, had taken a canary in a cage with them when they descended below. The bird – a brief, pitiful puff of saffron, fidgeting fretful – was watched as close as the colour of the candle flame. If the bird died, the air was bad.

The seam had been worked out long ago. The quarrying men had moved on. Moghedien felt like that canary – an unwilling sojourner far below the ground. Save the Ways themselves, the Spider could not conceive of a more hellish, or inimical place. That was why she had chosen it as the repository for a terrible secret. A place she herself would never visit, unless her need was great.

Some things were best left buried.

The alcove, a spur branching off from the trunk of the main shaft, was concealed behind a screen of _saidar_ , appearing as another, featureless stretch of the passageway wall, cold-slick rock sweating frigid water.

The inverted weave yielded to Moghedien's touch, her hand passing through the illusion, clearing it like cobwebs. Her heart-rate elevated, she ducked under the low ceiling, supported above by a waist-thick wooden joist, to enter the small room hollowed into the rock, crouching down to press her bare palm upon the floor.

There was another inverted web there, a lethal trap of Spirit, Water and Air which Moghedien's touch dissipated harmlessly.

The chamber was dominated by a sarcophagus carved from some light white stone. The casket though well-crafted, was plain, without ornament or any identifying mark. It was not the only object in the room. There were two human skeletons, lying where they had fallen, the size of the clean white bones identifying them as belonging to two adult males.

This tomb kept its secrets.

The lid of the casket was heavy, beyond the physical capacity of Moghedien to lift. It moved easily enough upon flows of Air as she pried up an edge, then constructed a frictionless surface that the brittle pane of limestone slid down, to be set down softly upon its long edge behind the coffin.

The hollow casket contained the bones of a small female, delicately formed, with the glossy teak patina of great age. A girl upon the cusp of womanhood.

Moghedien knew that once, an exquisitely long time ago, the skeleton had belonged to a real person. A _gholam_ was more than merely human, but still, as with so many of Aginor's creations, a human life together with its incorporated genetic material was required. A life. And a soul.

Moghedien drew a short, very sharp knife from her hip, and before she could think twice, opened a shallow gash upon her palm, hissing at the kiss of the blade's edge. Blood welled up as she cupped her hand, before reaching into the coffin, inverting her hand to spatter the bones with her own blood.

At first, nothing happened. Then with shocking rapidity, the skeleton began to writhe, becoming plastic as the dark magic activated.

It was not a painless process, this resurrection of the body, as the apparatus of tendons, ligaments and musculature formed upon the frame of bone, tightening with the grisly, grating wrench of a harpsichord being tuned.

As her vocal chords took shape, the creature began keening, screaming like a mandrake, thrashing. Heels drumming the floor in anguish. No living thing could undergo this process of rebirth and remain sane. Veins bulged, arteries coiled. The agency of tormented life – vital and corrupted as the Blight – could not be denied.

Finally, the thing was done. Moghedien looked down at the _gholam_ , as it lay still, something flawless now. Porcelain skin that no knife could mar. Eyes of beguiling innocence, a watercolour blue so pale they were almost transparent. A young girl, gentle and vulnerable in her nakedness.

Moghedien could see her own likeness in the creature as it lay there in dreamless repose. It was keyed to Moghedien by her mitochondrial DNA, she knew. That was the reason the _gholam_ was hers to command. Hers and hers alone. It would answer to none other.

Moghedien felt an unexpected tenderness towards this lost creature, brought forth in suffering as she herself had been. The only daughter she would ever be able to give birth to. The briefest moment of warmth. Dispelled when those glacial eyes found hers, this _thing_ rearranging its features into a facsimile of a warm smile.

The _gholam_ drew itself upright, palms bracing against the sides of the box. A serpentine writhe that no human body could imitate, bands of musculature clenching as it stretched languorously in the sarcophagus, flexing its spine as it yawned, jaw briefly dislocating and elongating to reveal bloody canines, before snapping shut like a mousetrap.

The thing swayed like a cobra, holding to her gaze hungrily as Moghedien made eye contact. This was the moment of danger, she knew, where the _gholam'_ s programming was weakest, where the craving for blood might override reason, before it recognised its Mistress.

Finally, the horror lowered its eyes, cadaverous and sly and pale, as it offered Moghedien a travesty of a respectful bow.

" _Mia'cova"_ the _gholam_ said, tongue chasing liverish lips. "I hunger."


	53. Chapter 53: Scarlet Town

**Chapter 53: Scarlet Town**

" _Buddy, I went down to Scarlet Town,_

 _Ain't never been there before –_

 _You slep' on a feather-bed,_

 _And I slept on the floor."_

Jasper-coated infantry in carapaces of steel double-filed through the Gateway, stolid, leaning into the Northland chill. Their tall helms, ant-like, gleamed glossy black under the lossy light, a tangerine sun that throbbed painfully at the day's end as the horizon tightened upon it. The edge of a copper coin swallowed by a skinflint's purse. Old and cussed with memory. Begrudging.

" _Now, I don't mind no lean old time,_

 _Or drinkin' my coffee cold –_

 _But the things I seen in Scarlet Town_

 _Did mortify my soul"_

An abrasive wind snatched up dust in ready handfuls. Day's last light percolating through the grit lent an overexposed sepia pallor. Terracotta poverty.

Slat-thin children stared up at the marching soldiers, open-mouthed. Faces full of a sullen, hostile pride, tinged with childish curiosity, they congregated on the street corners, in doorways, keeping a careful arm's length from the alien warriors and the tantalising threat of the bright metal they bore, a heliograph of brass and steel.

The men of Khoweal, black of skin under their armour, paid the gawking children little mind, Mordred was pleased to note. They knew their business.

A mother, eyes wide beneath her _ki'sain_ , emerged from her hovel, scrawny arm shepherding her child – a pinched-face girl – out of sight, into the shelter of a dark doorway. The girl's saffron hair-ribbon caught the light as she was hustled indoors, out of sight. A mote of precious amber in a cheap pasteboard setting. Marham. A small town in Malkier. Of no account. Except that the Seanchan had come here first.

The door banged closed behind mother and daughter. Mordred heard the sounds of bolts being forced home in their brackets. Locked and barred. The transient security of propriety.

 _The wind may enter,_ Mordred remembered, _and the rain may enter. But the king cannot enter._

He smiled, faintly.

The soldiers sang their marching-song with glum good-cheer, their deep voices husky and mellow. Singing the blues under a ruddy sky. Marham might be a mean place, but they would be sleeping beneath a roof this night. Between walls of fired clay bricks, under a roof of twin sheets of canvas packed with straw for insulation, tacked to the roof joist with stout iron pegs.

Tonight, they would eat hot food – salt beef and beans – around a warm fire. Draw close in fellowship. The now was all that mattered. The fighting men of the Southlands might be marching to war, might be in battle with the Aiel or Malkieri armsmen when dawn broke tomorrow. That was a soldier's creed. Look to today. Let tomorrow look after itself.

" _I look at that deep well,_

 _I look at that dark grave –_

 _Ringin' that iron bell_

 _In Scarlet Town today."_

The wind kicked up, rattling the dust, fingers of air plucking at his men's banners, snapping the cloth taut. Mordred shrugged deeper into the folds of his leather greatcoat, glad of the stiff high collar that kept the chill at bay, pulling his dust-cloth up to cover his mouth. His hands were warm, buried in the supple leather of kidskin gloves, right hand never far from the reassuring wire-bound hilt of his short sword on his left hip.

He looked to his right. As yet, Mordred had no Truthspeaker. He would have no need of such when he reclaimed his property. The Darkbox. For now, Beca Surehand stood in his shadow. A loyal woman. She would serve him well, tendering faithful counsel, as Tylee Khirgan had done for so many years. She would also command the Winged Hammer when the time came. An awesome responsibility for one of her youth. Not one afforded her by nepotism. Beca Koukal knew her business.

Other Gateways sprang into being across the town's central square, their precise locations exactingly specified well in advance. They each disgorged a short double-line of women, each pair locked in a symbiotic embrace. Leashed One and Leash Holder. A hundred pairs here, a hundred more in nine other nearby locations surrounding Marham. You didn't trust all your eggs to one basket.

Flights of _raken_ and _to'raken_ for aerial support would shortly be entering Malkieri air-space in the next few hours, under the cover of darkness. Most were attached to his elite fighting force, the Winged Hammer.

He intended to field somewhere upwards of a hundred thousand men and one thousand _damane_. Sufficient manpower to outnumber anything his foes could assemble, without being unwieldy. Supported by five thousand _lopar,_ two hundred _grolm_.

With regret, Mordred had been forced to leave his _s'redit_ behind _._ Making Gateways large enough to accommodate the building-sized animals was difficult enough, even with specialised _ter'angreal._ Ultimately, however, the decision to abandon the _s'redit_ had been motivated by something more prosaic – the sheer logistics of providing sufficient forage. The greatest danger his men faced was neither the Aiel nor their allies. It was barren Malkier itself. Hunger, thirst and disease were the greatest killers of men.

He clicked his fingers, summoning a barrel-chested guard Captain, a matchlock musket braced upon his left shoulder. The Khoweali saluted, fist to heart, silently awaiting his Emperor's instructions.

Mordred's hand gesture encompassed the town and all its inhabitants. _Hunger, thirst and disease._ "Evict these people," he ordered. "Drive them eastwards. Towards the Seven Towers. Despoil the fields. Take anything they've planted that we can use to feed our men. What we don't need, burn."

Let Lan Mandragoran and the Aiel deal with the logistics of feeding all those additional useless mouths. The sight of burning fields and buildings was a message in and of itself. _Come out and fight. Or watch your people starve._

Use every weapon at your disposal.

Beca Koukal shuffled her feet beside him. He looked askance at her, his voice remote. "You have something to say, Banner-General? You may speak your mind."

The young woman swallowed. "Many of those folk will die out there, Sire." Beca managed, in a queasy voice. "This is an evil thing that you do."

Mordred Paendrag only nodded, his unlined face unruffled calm. The broad brim of his slouching hat concealed the expression in his eyes from her in shadow.

"Yes, Beca." Mordred concurred, in a matter-of-fact tone that chilled her more than his anger ever could. "It is an evil thing, at that. See that it is done, nonetheless."

Beca wrenched her gaze away from Mordred. Watched her soldiers turning people from their homes. A small girl, huddling under her mother's arm, turned a beseeching gaze upon Beca, perhaps thinking a woman might be more inclined to help than a man.

The child's mother – knowing better – excoriated Beca Koukal with her glare, compassing frozen hatred and contempt.

A stray gust of wind plucked a bright scrap of silk free from the tangle of the child's dishevelled hair, a flash of canary yellow, fluttering to the dust to be sullied. Trodden underfoot.

 _I am complicit,_ Beca thought, savagely. Forced herself to look. To endure the hostile, sullen stares of the people she had made refugee. _This is the end of duty._

" _Now you might hide in Scarlet Town,_

 _For a hundred years or more –_

 _But the man who knows what time it is,_

 _Is knocking at the door._

 _Look at that deep well,_

 _Look at that dark grave –_

 _Ringing that iron bell,_

 _In Scarlet Town today."_


	54. Chapter 54: Knotai

**Chapter 54: Knotai**

"Light, Lan!" Nynaeve expostulated, shooing him out from underfoot. "I'm pregnant. Not infirm. Let me do something for myself!" She picked up the poker and began turning over the fire, jabbing the embers and partially-consumed coals viciously enough to spin a glowing ember out of the grate.

"We do have servants, Nynaeve" her husband replied with strained patience, snagging the coal and slinging it back into the fire's heart with a snap of the wrist, before it could skitter as far as the woven rug. At times, Nynaeve fumed, Lan's unruffled competence was a source of unacknowledged irritation in and of itself. "Servants, who see to these things so that we can be more usefully employed in serving them" he concluded, somewhat pointedly. "How went things with the Amyrlin?"

Nynaeve set the poker aside with a clatter and commenced pacing, tugging at her braid like a man climbing a rope. Lan judged her anger was as much for herself as Cadsuane. "That gurning gudgeon! She refused to send sisters to aid Malkier to fight in the battle. She refuses to do so much as send sisters from _my_ Ajah to aid in Healing the wounded. And when I brought up the matter of the White Tower's previous failings regarding Malkier, she directed me to send you a missive of censure by my own hand. And slapped me with a private penance to boot. Mortification of the Flesh."

"'A Sitter of the Yellow Ajah is not the Amyrlin Seat, girl'" Nynaeve imitated Cadsuane with savage rancour, coming to the boil like a kettle. "'You will show our person an appropriate degree of respect. Not to mention decorum.' Decorum! Lan, that .. fishwife .. chose to administer the penance herself. Lan?"

Lan's gaze was distant, as he turned to the open window, looking out at the plain below. Snow was falling gently. "I fear we are finished, then," Lan spoke quietly, as if it was of no moment.

There was disappointment in his eyes which silenced her as surely as a slap to the face would have done. _He thinks my temper has cost us all,_ Nynaeve mourned, _but that wasn't the way of it. Not at all. Cadsuane had already made up her mind!_

"It turned out," Nynaeve spoke up, defensively, "the penance was a ploy to give us time alone, away from the ears of the Keeper and other eavesdropping Aes Sedai. I still got my strapping. But the real purpose was her entrusting me with a few things of the One Power – no _angreals,_ sadly, but a few very useful _ter'angreals_. Including not a few copies of the foxhead medallion that Mat wears – which renders him immune to attacks using the One Power – to be doled out where needed. Among important battlefield leaders and the like.

The Amyrlin also reminded me that she hadn't prohibited the Aes Sedai already here in Malkier from acting as they see fit. 'The White Tower cannot be seen to take an active part in favouring one nation over another,' she said, 'and it is not the purview of Tar Valon to enforce the mandate of the Dragon's Peace. But I am minded to lend the people of Malkier humanitarian aid, in view of the ongoing famine crisis.' In other words, Lan, she was saying, 'Here is a knife, my friends. See what you can cut with it.'"

"A knife?" Lan frowned. "I'm sorry, I don't understand. A few foxhead medallions aren't going to make a big enough difference. Does the Amyrlin not understand our need? We are fighting for our very _lives_."

Nynaeve allowed herself a smug smile. "She did also give us the loan of a certain _ter'angreal._ The Bowl of the Winds. You could use it to cure a drought, if you were minded. Of course, there are a few evil-minded people I could think of that might think to turn such a bounty to other, less benevolent uses."

Lan's smile was grim and earnest. "Somebody like young Master Cauthon, perhaps?"

Nynaeve nodded. "These Seanchan have come to take everything we have, including our lives. They won't harm my people. Not while I am here to stop them" she vowed. "A storm is coming. _We_ are going to bring the storm. Not them."

"Spoken like Elisande of Manetheren." Lan growled, approvingly.

* * *

Mat tugged shut the awning of the big marquee tent against the knife-edge of the winds, giving the falling snow a disgusted look. The army of Malkier and its allies were assembling on the barren plain, which until yesterday had been the Taardad Aiel encampment. Roving bands of Aiel, some as large as regiments, marauded the surrounding foothills, and the reaches of the terrain. There were thirty-five thousand Aiel warriors within ten square miles.

Al'Akir shoved a pitcher of mulled wine across the top of the trestle table to Mat as he sat down, stretching out his long shanks. The young man was proving to be a tolerable _aide de camp,_ having mastered the principal skills required – being able to locate and provide whatever was required, precisely when it was needed. Near the top of Mat's list was wine, tabac, and some half-decent food.

Lan's boy was growing into the role, Mat felt, though he wasn't up to the high standards of Vanin. If the old poacher and horse-thief somehow showed up, Mat would elevate the old rascal to quartermaster, however. He'd be wasted as a personal equerry. That was a young man's role. The way you 'prenticed a general-to-be, in a way that ensured they didn't get a swollen head in the process.

The best quality about young al'Akir was that he didn't grumble about being kept far from the action, as most young fellows were predisposed to do. Not that he looked the sort to shy away from a scrap, either. He also listened, and did what was asked of him, to the letter. Which made him a paragon, in Mat's book.

Mat grabbed a battered pewter tankard and helped himself to a mugful. The red-hot poker that had heated the wine had probably boiled off most of the alcohol – a good thing – but the brew still _tasted_ like drink ought to, which was what counted. He could almost feel his frozen toes uncurl from the fortifying heat of the liquid.

The young prince was in his shirtsleeves, seemingly inured to the inclement weather. Well. He was Lan's son, which meant he likely pissed vinegar and shat cement. "Al'Akir, have you seen the reports, lad?"

"Ay, Banner-General" the youth announced with alacrity. You could almost hear the crack of his bootheels coming together, at attention. "As you know, Faile Bashere's Saldeans are here and quartered already. Ten thousand Saldean lancers. No foot.

So's Perrin Aybara, naturally enough. He's not brought many, but they are all quality. Fifteen hundred Two Rivers bowmen – and twenty wains full of arrow shafts, bowcords and spare bows. Two hundred thousand arrows – enough for a campaign. And one hundred Wolf Guards. Heavy infantry, equipped in Andor plate. I hear good things. They were trained in the sword and bow by no less than Tam al'Thor, drilled in the same manner as the Illianer Companions."

Mat nodded, pleased. Manetheren had come. "And what of Andor?"

At this, Al'Akir ran a hand through his hair. "They are the greatest loss to our cause. With Queen Elayne dead, and the Daughter-Heir securing the Throne, Andor will not march. And nor will Cairhien. At one stroke, we lose the strength of two nations."

"And their Dragons" Mat rued. "Could have used them."

Al'Akir continued a dreary litany of states – Illian, Tear, Mayene, Murandy – all weaselling out of their commitments to the Dragon's Peace. More cheer was to be had from the staunch Borderland nations. Kandor sent five thousand iron horsemen – that must be near every fighting man they had. Shienar, seven thousand. But Arafel had only sent one thousand men. A tithe, if that, of their true strength!

At least they were heavy foot, of which Mat had precious few. He was still dubious about Lan's idea of putting the Stone Dogs in plate. There was more than guts and stout armour required for fighting as a heavy infantry company.

There was no doubt, given time, the _Shae'en M'taal_ had the raw ingredients to become a truly elite infantry banner. But Mat couldn't see them pulling it off in the time they had left, despite Lan's enthusiasm for the idea. The truth was, they had a very unbalanced army, half of it light infantry, the other half heavy cavalry.

All told, he'd be fielding just shy of sixty thousand men. Against an enemy that could potentially press half a million armed men! It wouldn't be that grim, Mat thought. Hoped. More like a hundred thousand enemy combatants. Still odds of two to one.

Mat had surveyed the battlefield. Another huge disadvantage was that in order to bring the Seanchan to battle, he had to offer favourable terrain. The plumes of smoke on the horizon eloquently expressed his adversary's intent to burn and reave until Mat gave battle in a place that suited them.

 _Damn you, boy!_ Mat thought, angry now. _You brought down Handoin, only to become him!_ With effort, he quelled the rage. You needed to be calm, controlled. It wasn't personal. It was just strategy.

Lies!

It was nothing _but_ personal, this time.

Mat beckoned Al'Akir to join him, and the two men braved the cold outside, staring through the gently-falling snow upon the killing field he had chosen.

Well, he couldn't offer a fairer place than this. In the middle of a plain, surrounded by high ground on both flanks. A place where the foe could both outflank him on the left and take the high ground easily. Mordred would leap at the chance. Mat knew he himself would, if their positions were reversed.

"Get hold of someone in charge of Lan's levy" Mat snapped at Al'Akir, a good deal more coldly than he had intended. "They'll be of no bloody use in the battle, but I could use a labour force." He jabbed his dagger at two points on the map that was stretched upon the table-top, edges held down with inkwells, tankards and his dice-cup. "Here. And here. I want the river dammed."

Al'Akir frowned. "That'll flood the battlefield."

"Not all of it" Mat told him. "And not all at once. It looks flat, but it isn't. The end we hold is slightly elevated. I had the surveyors check it. It won't brim over the banks immediately, as the river backs up. The enemy won't realise, at first. They'll deploy, and then they'll be flooded."

Al'Akir visualised it. The river brimming up, and then releasing its water onto the plain. The Seanchan army, ordering its battle formation to face them, now slogging through ankle-deep water and mud to reach their lines. A minor hindrance. But not the master-stroke Mat was clearly envisaging, judging from the glint in his eyes. A man with a royal flush, about to show his cards.

Al'Akir sighed. Decided to point out the obvious, knowing he was missing something. "The plain down there isn't going to flood more than a foot deep at the most. They won't like it, but it won't stop them. What am I missing?"

Mat laughed, clapping him on the shoulder amiably. "Think on it" he offered, encouragingly. "But keep your musings to ourselves, eh?"

The dice started rattling inside Mat's head.

 _Oh, burn me!_ Mat winced. _Burn me like yesterday's bacon!_

A survivor's instinct made him look over his shoulder, just in time to see a small, hooded figure duck out furtive from under the awning of the command tent they'd so recently vacated. Finding himself discovered, the man took off, haring towards the picket-lines. No doubt planning to steal a horse and abscond. Mat's battle plans tucked under his arm!

With a curse, Mat took off in hot pursuit. After a moment's staring incomprehension, al'Akir joined the chase. Mat quickly gained on the slight figure, his long legs easily outstripping them. _Mother's milk in a cup,_ Mat realised, mid-stride. _I don't even have my ashanderai._

He launched himself in a flying tackle, arms locking around the fugitive's legs, and the two of them went down in the dirt, rolling over and over.

The spy was wiry, and surprisingly strong, twisting like an eel in his grasp to clobber him hard in the ear with a back-fist. The blow was hard enough that Mat saw stars, and the enemy agent broke free, scrabbling to their hands and knees. Mat grabbed at them, missed, caught a handful of cloak instead. And Mat caught a glimpse of their desperate, frightened face, staring up at him.

 _Tuon!_

She froze. Al'Akir had caught up, and his sword was in his hand. In his eyes was no recognition of Tuon. Or perhaps he knew her face, and decided it didn't matter. He just saw a spy. _A Seanchan._

Perhaps two of them, at that.

Mat threw his arms around Tuon protectively, and wonder of wonders, she stilled in his arms.

"Sheathe your blade" Mat snapped at al'Akir. "Do it now! Go back to the tent and wait. Do _not_ speak of this to a soul. That's an _order_."

With a long look for Tuon, and a mistrustful look for Mat, the youth angrily rammed his blade home in its sheath and stalked away.

Mat turned his gaze on Tuon. "What in the Light are you about?" he growled, fear becoming relief and then fury. "You're apt to get yourself killed!"

Tuon clutched her cloak tighter to her, despite the buffer of Mat's arms, his warm body, and Mat felt the outline of a defined cylindrical object under it. He wrenched the tube free, with a sudden chill. A cylindrical roll of papers. Mat's map of the battlefield, together with all the paginations, all the annotations. Hieroglyphs to most folk, but enough and more for his son to puzzle out Mat's intent.

"Why?" Mat asked. Hurt in his eyes. But his arms still held her tight. Unwilling to let go.

Tuon stiffened, but held his gaze with sudden, decisive pride. "I have thought upon it, Knotai. Ever since we came here to Malkier. He is our boy. Whatever he did to us. And if we beat him, tear him down, they will kill him. As they killed Handoin.

And I love the Empire, too, Mat. Without him, there is no successor. It will be bloody anarchy. You cannot take the throne. It will all die with him. So, I will go to him. Give myself up. It is the best thing for the Empire. Can't you see that?"

Mat groaned. "You know, for an intelligent woman, you can be a right _idiot._ You assume you have all the answers. You always have. You are looking at this through your flaming ego. Willing… No, _wanting_ to sacrifice yourself. Even me! Even your honour! Because you have this twisted idea that is what duty demands. To feed Seanchan with everything you care about. To bleed yourself white of all that matters.

 _It's not bloody healthy, and it's not bloody right, and I've put up with it long enough, and it stops now, Tuon!_ You don't have to do this on your own. Be bloody well told!

I've racked my brains, too, trying to find a way through this flaming mess. Because I love Seanchan, too, Tuon. You're all crazy. Maybe that's why I fit right in, like I never did anywhere else. Light help me, all the plotting, and battles, and _Daes Dae'mar._ It's a part of me, like it's a part of you. I hate and love it. Your beautiful, bloody Empire. I want to restore it. Reshape it. Help it become what it was meant to be. Without _da'covale_ and _damane_ and Seekers After Truth!

Right now, Tuon, none of that matters. There's just one question you need to answer. Do you trust me? Or am I still Toy to you, deep down? _I_ have a plan, Tuon. It's beautiful, and audacious. Not just for this battle, but for all of it.

Together, we have a chance to make this right. You and me. I've been playing my cards close to my chest of late. From you, and from the rest of the world. I thought you had enough on your plate. But I want to show you my hand. This isn't solitaire, Tuon. This is bridge. We're partners. Or I swear to the Light, I'm done. We go our separate ways. I love you. But we can't go on like this."

Tuon looked up at Mat, eyes shaded bitter with anguish and guilt. Swallowed. Nodded. "I'm in, Mat" she said, finally. No tears. No apology. She would carry her shame awhile. That was her way.

"Just as bloody well," Mat growled, a lump in his throat as he clutched her to him fiercely. "Because I cannot live without you."


	55. Chapter 55: Strayaway Child

**Chapter 55: Strayaway Child**

Dai knew her as well as the back of his hand. The caravan, with its rounded roof close and sheltering, flaring out from its high wagon-bed like the boxy stern-castle of a Seanchan ship. There was no cheap pitch-pine or deal boards to splinter in her fabrication, no. She was white oak and hickory. Carved in a phantasmagoria of decorative whorls.

He loved her better now than when he first bought her, new, glistening with fresh paint of crimson and emerald, trimmed with gold leaf. Her paint was faded, timbers chipped and worn back to the bare wood in places, and she sagged upon her springs, but she was weathered, home for him and his Mai. Had been for the past twenty years.

They'd never been blessed with children – a sorrow that had, too, been smoothed and polished by age and craftsmanship. Perhaps it had been for the best. Even among the _Tuatha'an_ , their wanderlust was a thing to speak of. Dai and Mai. The two of them were complete. They didn't need anyone else. Just each other's company, and the wonder of new places. Not that they disliked other folk, for that matter. It was a grand thing when their travels brought them back among the people, to recline by the braw blaze of a communal bonfire on a green sward. Watch the young folk dance to fiddle and cittern. Sing soft into the maudlin night when the ale took him that way. And he'd never get tired of hearing the Song of Growing, long-sought, then found.

They'd been there, on that day.

A stranger had come, an Andorman, with long dark hair. A quiet fellow, Dai thought. A handsome lad, clean-shaven and slim, with a kind of long-limbed strength that he carried lightly. Young but old somehow. Not jaded. Just weary.

The young lasses, drawn to him as much by that timeless quality as by his clean beauty, sought to entice him to dance. Pretty young things, delighting in their charms in a wholesome way, and the intoxicating effect they had on men, taking good-natured joy in the stammering and red-faced blushing from a chap, when they kicked up their heels in sport. This young man had rebuffed them, with a careful, bruised gentleness – careful not to hurt them either, but the doing of it had made him sad, somehow. _Poor lad,_ Mai had whispered to Dai.

The Andorman had sat awhile, content to watch, smoking his pipe, and then as the night drew on, he'd brought out a wooden flute, and they'd all gathered round, the folk, in curiosity at first.

He'd played, a little. Poorly, as if the instrument was new to him, but profoundly, too, with all the distilled experience of long biting years. The wayfarer was a hard flake of a man, knapped into something keen and bright and _that_ had been in his music. By the kind of troubles the _Tuatha'an_ would flee from, if they could, but that was his truth, and they heard him out, with the sorrow reserved for those maimed because they knew not the Way of the Leaf. His fingers on the flute stumbling, faltering, a man finding his way home through the dark. So they'd listened.

He'd played a march, and they'd have been affronted that this stranger would bring the music of his war to them, except for the regret that slowed his measure. Finally, it ended.

He'd begun anew into an appalled silence. The first notes he'd uttered had a brittle, unvarnished ache to them, and just for a moment, the folk had all asked themselves: _Is this… Could this be The Song?_ The song none knew, that had been lost from them long-ago, but that could never be mistaken when it was finally heard. _Can it be..?_ Just for the merest moment. Then they had woken from hope, because there was nothing in this music other than brittle, plangent grief, with no respite.

After an age, he fell silent, and they shivered. This man, this stranger, this soldier – that truth was in his song for all to hear – he couldn't possibly know The Song. No man could hold the lament he'd played – an ancient grief – and the song which his people sought so desperately, surely. The dissonance would tear their soul asunder like mildewed cloth. But somebody had asked him, anyway: _Stranger, do you know the song?_

He had laid down the flute, careful, and met their eyes honestly. "Ay," he said, unselfconsciously. As if it was of no matter to him. "I think I have it."

He hadn't needed the flute for the Song Of Growing. Just his voice. What was in him transcended the instrument. All witnessed the truth. For those who needed proof, there'd been a girl with a crooked leg, maimed long ago, who'd watched the dancing with plaintive, longing gaze.

After the song was done, she joined the dance. They all had. Even the solemn stranger. And the Song had settled upon them all, all who were there, to some degree of grace. Become a part of them, as it had always meant to be. The gift was great or lesser depending on the singer. A small, hale kindness to most folk.

Dai glowed with the memory as he stooped to trim the wick of his little tilly-lamp, attenuating the little yellow flame that made the recess of the trailer a soft-edged, gentle place.

The caravan's interior was that ambient place between shipshape and untidy, bustling with packed shelves and cupboards filled with tools, utensils and bric-a-brac, but either of them could easily have rousted anything they needed from the clutter in the dead of night.

There was a worn throw, lying on the floor beside the fold-out bed affixed to the wall, which was where their hound slept of a night. Bran was an intimidating, grizzled slab of muscle, fearsome as a Shienaran warrior to look upon, but in truth, he was a gentle-hearted thing. Like them, the old rascal was getting on in years. Now he slept in the caravan, beside them, instead of outside, where his intimidating mien and ferocious barking deterred would-be robbers.

Dai frowned. Bran wasn't in his quilt, as was his wont by now. Doubtless he was nosing around outside. Still, it was time to call him in. Grumbling, he shrugged into his patchwork cloak.

"Where you off to?" Mai hailed him, voice heavy with sleep. "Come back to bed."

"Just going to round up Bran, and lock up, sweetheart" he called over his shoulder.

Dai looked out. Dusk had stolen a march on them, and the twilight world was illuminated brightly by an ocean of stars. He shook his head, lost in wonder at it all. _Who would choose to live in a city?_ Dai wondered. _And miss out on a marvel like this!_ He'd seen a thousand such nights, yet the awe never left.

This was a bleak spot, apart from the whorling majesty of the constellations above. A single tree, winter-stripped, alleviated the barren heights the road wound over.

As his eyes adjusted to the twilight, Dai's ears noticed something missing. He couldn't hear the chuffing breathing of the shire-horses that pulled the caravan. Nor could he see Bran. Curious, but unalarmed, he thought of venturing back indoors to fetch his tilly-lamp to investigate further.

Then he saw the girl.

She was young, and quite naked. Dancing under the spreading thorns of the shade tree. Her body drank in the twilight, giving her skin a luminous glow. Her upturned face drank in the sky, arms spread wide, and she seemed to hardly move, just to shimmer like the moonlight itself.

Dai felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. There was an insouciant, unabashed innocence in her, he fancied. But what in the Light was she doing out here at all? They were thirty _miles_ from the nearest _house,_ let alone hamlet…!

In all his life he'd never seen anything like it.

Dai turned back inside, whispering in a low and urgent voice. As if this strange girl, like a venturesome squirrel, fey and wild, might take flight in alarm if she were startled. "Mai, come here. Quietly!" He paused, thinking. "And bring something warm. A blanket, for now." Light, the young lass was like to freeze to death!

He could hear his wife, busy stirring herself from the comfortable warm.

He turned back, and the child – she was a mere child at that – was halfway to him, head cocked curiously. Quick and quiet. Like a bird. He hadn't heard her footfalls upon the sward. Her dark hair had fallen loose across her brow, and the play of shadow obscured her features, except the somewhat puckish cast to her lips.

An odd chill began at the nape of Dai's neck, burrowing south. "Here" he began gently. Awkwardly. "Lass, don't you think you'd be more comfortable in the warm? With some clothes on…"

The girl stopped, seeming to savour his words, and even then, poised, there was something terribly quicksilver about her, a raptor deftness and delicacy that was sending all kinds of signals cascading along his medulla oblongata, the atavistic hind-brain forewarning him that he was in mortal danger.

Her face unveiled from the caul of shadows. It was sweet and sensitive, her eyes limpid pools, pupils night-big, like new moons. Dai released a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding. _Foolish megrims,_ he told himself. _She's just a girl._

Then she smiled, and he saw the sharp whiteness of her long incisors. A smile that did not begin to touch the dead, dark pools of her eyes. A drop of blood slowly trickled down her chin, coagulating glistening and black in the uncertain light, like spilled mercury.

He smelled its carrion breath, the spoiled grave-stench of it. The copper notes of fresh blood.

It spoke to him then. Crooning, as it stalked forward with an indecent lack of haste. Relishing the mortal fear in his eyes as he stood there, petrified. Unable to move.

Those chisel teeth teasing its lower lip, an obscene parody of a strayaway child.

"I am hungry" the thing mewled.


	56. Chapter 56: Before The Storm

**Chapter 56: Before the Storm**

An insouciant rook preened on the white bones of a Blight-claimed tree.

The corvid was not alone, Mat saw with disgust. The skeletal sapling was the only perch within eyeshot, its stripped boughs laden with sleek black bodies, ripe fruit heavy on the vine. They squabbled for space, throaty croaks ululating as they half-heartedly pecked at one another, jostling for room.

Rooks, crows and ravens. Scores of them. Harbingers of battle, outriders arriving in advance of the Seanchan. Borderlanders and the sons of Manetheren knew them for what they were. Scouts and spies. The Dark One's eyes. The war was old for the chary black birds, too, and they kept a wary watch upon the fighting men, just out of bowshot.

 _I spied two flash fellas, a playin' at dice_

 _They both looked me over, and thought me a price –_

 _A North-Country sheep who had strayed from the fold,_

 _The bulge in his pockets fair bursting with gold,_

Mat levelled a Two Rivers arrow, craning his neck to fix his one good eye upon his target. His ill humour, aroused by the unwelcome presence of the carrion birds, was not helped by another reminder of his maiming at the hands of the Finn.

He sighted upon his mark, a fat old crow. _Big as a bloody barn, Mat my lad. You should be able to hit that, at least!_ Once, he could have took a bird upon the wing. Any self-respecting Two Rivers archer could do the same.

The corvid peered at him blearily, as if thoroughly uninterested, willing to wager its life against Mat's archery.

 _They invited me kindly to join in their play,_

" _It depends on the stakes, gentlemen, I did say –_

 _One said a guinea, I said ten pound,_

 _The stakes they were fixed, but no money laid down!_

Mat exhaled as he released his arrow. He knew the second the shaft left the string that he'd missed. The arrow slapped the branch between the crow's feet and the bird flapped into the air awkwardly, cawing its protest at being disturbed. A single black tail feather dropped as the ungainly bird bludgeoned the air in its dudgeon. _Blood and bloody ashes!_

Angry now, Mat snatched another shaft from his quiver, nocked and drew with the familiarity of muscle memory. Back muscles that had not been exercised in some time protested under the strain. A deep ache between the shoulderblades. Archery wasn't just in the arms. Drawing a Two Rivers longbow was like lifting a man and a half using only one arm.

For a second time, he sighted upon the irksome crow. Just before he released the arrow, he shut his one eye. Made a fractional correction without looking. Loosed. This time, he made no mistake. The corvid dropped like a ripe fruit, hitting the ground with an audible thud. Mat grinned. _Never bet against a half-blind ta'veren._

 _So I took up the dice, and I gave it a spin_

 _It was my good fortune that wager to win –_

 _But if things had've been different, they both would have cursed,_

 _For all they'd have won was me empty old purse!_

Luck. You could not bloody beat it.

Especially when all you had to wager with was your pocket-lint!

Al'Akir whistled softly between his teeth. Mat realised why. His arrow had neatly transfixed the bird's head. Straight through both eyes.

The air exploded with a cacophony of cawing as the carrion birds flocked, abandoning their perch and streaming away to safety. They didn't go far. They knew what was coming. And they all wanted their place at the table. Al'Akir managed to take one on the wing with his horsebow from the saddle. The boy was no slouch.

Abruptly, the air rippled about two hundred yards from where Mat was standing. Muttering dark imprecations, the Raven Prince rubbed his arms, smoothing away sudden goosebumps which had little to do with the brisk Borderland cold.

It was as if the dry ground had been sown with Dragon's teeth, a score of Gateways sliding into reality from the ground up, silvery mirrors sprouting from the soil before their structure firmed, becoming portals between here and … where, exactly?

That was the pertinent question, wasn't it? Friend or foe?

Men in dark high-collared coats began to issue from the Gateways, lean, haughty-looking fellows with long swords belted to their sides. Swords that were very much a weapon of last resort for these men, though the Raven Prince had no doubt these men knew how to use them, too. Mat breathed a long sigh of pure relief. The _Asha'man_ had come.

Mat took stock of them as they dressed ranks. They did it well, he noted, double-filing into a tight formation, ranked five men deep and forty men wide.

At a taut command from their _Tsorovan M'hael,_ they enfiladed from tightly-packed ranks to triple-spaced with a smooth precision, the men standing a pike's length apart across a broad frontage. There was no need for a deep, compact formation. They weren't pikemen or men-at-arms. The men of the Dark Tower needed space to kill. He had seen them fight before, and they were terrifying.

This martial demonstration was for his benefit. He had met _Asha'man_ before, fought alongside them at the Last Battle. The demographic was different this time around. No greybeards. These were all young, fit warriors in their physical prime. Every man wearing the Sword and the Dragon pins, too.

The _Asha'man_ might take every man that could channel. But just like the Aes Sedai, there were those who gravitated towards other paths than the martial, by inclination or temperament. This double century were not of that stamp. He could read it upon their faces, clear as day. That chilling confidence. These were Logain's very best, he had no doubt. Each one a proven battlefield asset. Tried and tested.

Their presence here was a statement of intent from the _M'hael._ It was not simply a token gesture. Logain Ablar wanted to put the Seanchan on notice that any belligerent incursions into the Westlands would be faced by the full might of the Black Tower.

The _Asha'man_ waited in serried precision as their Captain marched forward towards Mat and al'Akir. He reminded Mat uncomfortably of the Forsaken, Sammael. A short man with a bull-neck, thickset, with short-cropped blonde hair. Not a fellow that looked as if he smiled too often. Or at all.

He stopped a few yards off, saluting Mat in the Borderland fashion – left fist to his chest, right hand upon the hilt of his sword. A fractional bow. _Very_ fractional. Grudging, almost. These were not men encumbered with too much in the way of humility.

That was fine with Mat. Right now, he almost wanted to hug the arrogant whoreson, just for being here and bringing two hundred _Asha'man_ along with him.

"Raven Prince Cauthon," the Storm Leader began, _there was a bloody suggestion of a question mark there,_ Mat thought drily. " _I_ have the honour to be Daeron Pellar, _Tsorovan'm'hael_ of the Black Tower _._

I bring you the compliments of the _M'hael,_ Logain Ablar. He desires me to let you know that the Black Tower stands with the Borderlands and the Aiel against Seanchan aggression in breach of the Dragon's Peace. We are Guardians in more than name only, of the Light and the realms of Men. Let it not be said that we _Asha'man_ forgot our duty."

Mat groaned internally, even as he framed his face into that puckish, conspiratorial grin which had served him so well these many years. "Master Pellar, you are _most_ bloody welcome! We are right glad to have you and your lads, let me tell you! I _knew_ that the _Asha'man_ would lend us their aid! Not like some… ladies, let us say, of our mutual acquaintance, eh? Allow me the honour of introducing my young companion, al'Akir, Crown Prince of Malkier."

The young Malkieri, of course, was a perfect foil to his own rough charm with his urbane wit, Mat observed. Mat could tell at a glance that this Pellar fellow was the sort whose ego would be burnished nicely by having a prince fawning over him, and al'Akir was well schooled in the nicer arts of diplomacy. Even better, he was a genuine, amiable lad. There was substance under the polish that folk warmed to.

It saved Mat the strain. He had a war to plan, after all. But _Light,_ this _Asha'man_ was a prickly pear. He could only hope Pellar knew his trade – and more importantly, was amenable to taking orders. Otherwise, the One Power or no, Mat was going to jump on him with both feet.

It was never the common soldiers you had to worry about. Keep 'em fed and paid, and they'd do their job. But venal sergeants or precious officers were another story entirely. And Mat had read that book, cover to cover, over a hundred lives.

As al'Akir steered the Storm Leader away, an amiable arm slung about the _Asha'man_ 's shoulder, Mat turned his attention towards the battlefield, much heartened by the reinforcements. In his heart of hearts, he had expected only a token force from the Black Tower. Mat could certainly find a place in his grand design for a couple of hundred, that was for sure. The rub of it was they wouldn't necessarily find some of the tasks to their taste or inclination. _Tough._ They could like it or lump it.

The battleground was taking shape in Mat's fertile mind. They would face the Seanchan in the centre of this broad alluvial plain between two low ranges of hills, keeping the river upon his right flank as an anchor. What with Travelling allowing his foes to pop up anywhere they chose, and Mat's side severely disadvantaged in numbers, they couldn't expect to hold a broad front, spanning the valley.

Obviously if he did that, Uthair would deploy up there on his left with the bulk of his army, sweeping down from the hills with his armour to roll up his wing and destroy him in detail. Consequently, Mat was forced to deploy in a compact formation with his infantry, a deep open box, leaving an undesirably big gap between his left wing and the hills. He could use his cavalry to protect the open flank, but they wouldn't stand up to the Seanchan heavy armour. The Aiel irregulars were quick enough at a pinch, but the more of them he committed, the weaker his centre would be….

Mat had framed a partial solution to that problem. There was a long drystone wall running the top of that ridge of hills, appending a farm complex, long-abandoned. A farmhouse at one end, which could be turned into a redoubt with very little effort. At the other end, there was a track bordered by two stone walls leading into what Mat guessed had once been a pen used for slaughtering livestock, or perhaps shearing sheep.

Altogether, the walls and buildings formed three sides of a long, narrow rectangle which he had made defensible, completing the square with a rampart of earth and a trench running around the outer perimeter. If he stationed heavy infantry there, he could hold the left flank. He could afford to be generous, now. Loan them a few _Asha'man_ and archers to bolster their defences.

Unless Mat's forces were cleared out of there, he couldn't easily be outflanked. Lan's cavalry could harass the Seanchan armour with bows from horseback, keeping them in play long enough for the armoured heavy infantry in the fort to pile into the _grolm_ assault.

An elegant solution, he thought. Turning a positional weakness and a disparity in troops into an advantage.

But it was still a _defensive_ strategy. Mat didn't like that. It wasn't in his nature, and Uthair would find a way to break him down. If nothing else, his son could simply opt to take the casualties, pouring troops into the channel between the farmhouse fort and Mat's left, forcing Lan to sacrifice his cavalry. The Malkieri horse would die, but so would the _grolm._ Uthair would lose his heavy armour, and the battle would devolve into a protracted infantry slog. The Seanchan, however, would have more than enough foot soldiers to finish the job. Even against the Aiel…..

Mat rubbed his tired eyes, kneaded his forehead with his knuckles. He did have a surprise in reserve, though. Something that might just do the trick. But that was the trouble with battles: _Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth._

The only certainty was that the ravens would be well-fed.


	57. Chapter 57: The Last Orphan

**Chapter 57: The Last Orphan**

The woman called Sada was little more than a wisp of thought. An unquiet reverie. She had been more, once. A twin. Her sister, Dar, had died recently. Fallen, along with so many others, when Emperor Mordred had assaulted the Palace in Ebou Dar.

Bloodknives lived ephemeral lives. You never knew what day your services would be called upon. That was a reality Sada had accepted, long ago. Her own death. You lived for the moment. Each day a rapture most folk would never know, because the next night might be your last. Yet Dar's loss left her bereft.

They had been inseparable in life, chosen for the same calling from thousands of candidates, advancing side by side in lockstep. Each was the other's strength.

Where others had faltered, failed the arduous selection tests for Fists of Heaven and the more exacting criteria for the elite Bloodknife cadre within the elite, the twins had progressed. They had an unfair advantage, each of them, over their competition. They had the resilience of two hearts, not one. It had always been thus.

So it was that Sada had always presumed they would die on the same day, carrying out their singular, fatal duty. Together in death, as in life. And so it had proved.

Except Sada's heart still beat. A funereal bell, tolling in her breast.

She had learnt something of how her sister had met her end. Cut down by a black-haired swordsman. He must have been a talented warrior to steal Dar's life, especially when her twin was obscured by Night's Shade. But not lucky, no! Because the death Dar would have given him would be a tender kiss of steel, followed by eternal sleep. Her sister was a gentle soul. Sada promised him an agony of days under a dull, heated knife. It wouldn't bring Dar back. But the whoreson would _pay._

It was good that the Bloodknives inspired dread, even in the Blood, who should have been above such concerns. It had made it easier to learn what she needed.

Conflicting rumours. Some said the murderer was one of the _Da'concion,_ an Undying _Tsorov'ande Doon_ Darkfriend called Moridin or Ishamael. That went a long way towards explaining how her sister had fallen to his blade. Then again, others maintained that the man she sought was the Dragon Reborn himself.

Sada didn't care either way. She would stick a shiv into the Creator or _Caisen Hob_ with equanimity if they had harmed Dar.

She was the Last Orphan.

* * *

The two of them had been the only survivors of Asinbayar. A city of wood, it had burned when the Bloody Boar savaged it. They hid from the blaze in the murky waters of a pond, breathing though straws.

The only thing left after the conflagration had been the tall stone and brick of those chimneys. And the siblings. Slat-thin, half-feral, they hunkered in the ruins, dwelling in one of those chimney-stacks, clambering up within at night to avoid the wild _torm_ scavenging in the rubble. Hunting rats and rabbits for food. Improvising tools and weapons.

Salvation had come in the form of an Air-Captain. A no-nonsense woman, who had interrogated them sharply, but without duress. At first, she hadn't believed the improbable story of their survival. Thought them infiltrators and spies, despite their youth. The twins hadn't been aware of it at the time, but their lives had likely hung in the balance.

That was until Dar showed her a _torm_ pelt the pair of them shared, that they huddled under for shelter on cold nights. A predator that had thought them an easy meal – until Sada garrotted it with a loop of steel wire whilst Dar stabbed it to death with a short spear fashioned from a fire-poker of iron, topped with a blade of knapped roof-slate.

Dar had showed the soldier their hand-crafted weapon too, grudgingly, as it was a treasured possession. Seen the Air-Captain's callous gaze grow interested. Appreciative.

She'd asked more questions. They'd showed her how they boiled water so as not to sicken from the cholera. How they made fire using broken glass to lens the sunlight. All the minutiae that defined their hard-won lives.

There'd been nobody to teach them. They'd had to learn everything the hard way. Suffering, improvising, extemporising. Failing. Failing better the next time. They were proud of what they had accomplished. That shone through everything they told the Southron soldier-woman.

"Come with me" she had ordered them.

The twins had followed her. Where else could they go? They had eaten salt beef that night, from the Fist of Heaven's meagre rations. Drunk hot mugs of reconstituted powdered milk until their bellies were full. A feast.

 _Nothing in life comes for free._

It turned out the Air-Captain had earmarked them as younglings with potential. The capability to adapt and survive. Prospective Bloodknives.

In the years that followed, they had proved the Captain's assessment to be correct. Sada bore the woman no ill-will for the way their lives had turned out subsequently. Like as not, they would have run out of luck at some point, otherwise. Fallen prey to voracious wild beasts, or starved to death. Sickened and died from drinking untreated water. It was a hard world, and the Air Captain was a product of it. Just as they were. She'd given the pair of them a chance at survival.

They'd taken it with both hands.

The Wheel turned.

* * *

The Bloodknife ring defined her span, now she had felt the prick of the thorns. A price she paid gladly, finding kinship in walking the same road Dar had taken. _Wait for me, D. I will catch up with you soon._ Together, they would greet their resurrection, when the Wheel chose to release them again. As indefatigably as they had faced this life. The hereafter held no fears for the twins.

 _Even a bramble has a flower._ The ring upon her finger.

Sada ebbed and flowed, baffled from view by arcane _marath'damane_ arts. These Aiel sentries kept a good perimeter, vigilant in twos and threes, but she came with the twilight. Though they kept watch with a sharpness of focus that indicated they knew what calibre of opponent they were up against, she had been doing this for half her life. They hadn't.

She infiltrated them, stealing boldly into their midst rather than doing what an inferior operative would in seeking the dead ground. She was a comrade's hand on a Maiden's shoulder, a Knife Hand's shadow. She _was_ one ofthem. Concentrating upon their dialogue, riffing with it in her mind. Filling the spaces. It was easy. She had spent her life amongst fighting men and women.

The pair of slender daggers at her waist remained untouched. Why would she need them? She was among her comrades. Amongst friends.

Yet Sada was compromised. She wanted to survive her immediate mission. Her duty accomplished, she would be free to hunt the Dark Man.

Duty. A cornerstone of Sada's life. Without Dar, she clung to it. It gave her purpose. An immediacy beyond revenge.

The stone wall ahead was an impenetrable dike. If she hopped over it, she would be discovered in a heartbeat. Instead she tracked around, painstakingly, a walk of half a mile. As if she was upon a stroll. Naturally.

The weak point allowing her infiltration was the levee of earth and rock the Aiel were labouring to erect upon the other side. Burlap sacks filled with soil. Crusted turves. She did her bit, hefting earth. Getting into character. On the inside of the boundary, the Aiel vigilance relaxed somewhat, but Sada remained alert.

Her goal was not the life of a single man or woman. There was a farmhouse up ahead, or its broken shell, open to the sky. A chimney-stack, jutting up starkly into the gloaming. It was funny, wasn't it? Life. Running in circles. Self-similar. She was back to the place where her life truly began.

* * *

The bothy was deserted as she stole within. She needed a place to hole up, undiscovered. The chimney, obviously. It would be fine, so long as nobody lit a fire in the hearth! But these Aiel preferred the open spaces rather than being penned up indoors. Besides, there was nowhere else fitted to her purpose.

Beyond that, it was serendipity. The Wheel turning. A chimney stack where she could curl up snug, a nest, comforted by feeling the presence of Dar. _So close_.

The weapon she brought to the fray was not steel. It was something far more deadly. The more so for being unexpected. Sada smiled a secret smile as she ducked under the low ceiling of the hearth. Shinned up into the confined space of the flue, her diminutive frame wriggling noiselessly through the darkness. _Dar, you would have enjoyed this!_

Waiting for the opportune time to strike.


	58. Chapter 58: Dark Seed

**Chapter 58: Dark Seed**

The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legends fade to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. The rocks themselves were agnostic of the turning of that Wheel. Only the winds that carved them remembered what was past. That was why they wept.

The wind was a stonemason's chisel, weathering the mesa of orange rock that rose jettying above the arid valley. The sands that wind carried had burnished its strata like a tiger's eye gem even as it eroded the soft stone, bringing out the grain. The air was dry. Desiccated.

Moghedien sheltered from the wind in the lee of a rock arch, a gargoyle's eye. Here, the storms, baffled, had carved the rock against the grain, etching vertical grooves in the sandstone, and the henge had fissured, cracking under the sun like a woman's chapped lips. A lidless iris staring into the sunset, the rock wept, the strata bleeding ferrous iron oxide.

The Forsaken clutched her hooded travelling-cloak about her against the chill. The air was thin up here, the day's heat dissipating swiftly into the pallid sky. Yet the desert rocks were still warm as loaves of fresh-baked bread to the touch.

Warily, the Spider watched the _gholam_ out of the corner of her eye. She had resurrected the creature as protection against the Dragon Reborn or anyone else that might come after her, and yet it filled her with dread. An irony. This _gholam_ had a naïve childlike cast to it, a quick, boundless curiosity that should have been endearing, except that precocity was as conscienceless as a cat's.

Right now, something had caught the _gholam_ 's eye, and it squatted upon its hunkers to examine what it had found, back turned to Moghedien. Yet, with flawless instinct, the creature turned to her the moment it felt the Spider's gaze, springing lightly to its feet to meet her regard. It might have the form of a child, but it was no such thing, and it moved like a leopard, musculature like steel cables articulating that seemingly delicate frame.

The _gholam_ shared some of Moghedien's genetic heritage, including her pale complexion. Yet where Moghedien shunned the harsh desert sunlight which would burn her fair skin, the _gholam_ , just as pallid, endured the blazing heat without changing, her flesh unburnt.

" _Mia'cova_ " the thing greeted Moghedien's appraisal, eyes half-shy, half-sly sizing her up with a sidelong glance. A leopard eyeing a gazelle. "See what I have found!"

There was a flower clutched in the _gholam_ 's fist, labial folds of delicate pink, sun-bleached and fine as streith, growing from a tough, abrasive stalk. At the centre of its petals, the opium poppy had kindled, the ripe, waxy belly of its seed-pod swollen, ready to disgorge its seeds.

The Sharans who dwelt in the valley below cultivated the poppies for narcotics and medicine. Some chance breeze had dispersed the poppy seed here, where nothing thrived, and somehow, it had not only grown but come to term. Until the _gholam_ had snatched it from the soil.

Moghedien knew that the _gholam_ 's senses were far more acute than those of any human. Its sense of smell was keener than a bloodhound's. To the _gholam_ 's nose, the opium was redolent. Something novel to savour and devour.

Quick teeth hulled the waxy rind, scattering petals like confetti as the _gholam_ battened upon the milky sap.

"Stop that at once!" Moghedien snapped at it, and the _gholam,_ obedient, froze. Its eyes – pupils engorged and black in irises that were the dark sepia of Moghedien's own – were both insolent and hungry, though. _Wonderful,_ despaired the Spider. _Up here alone, with this thing, which now appears to have acquired a taste for opiates._

Moghedien could only hope that the _gholam'_ s conditioning remained unimpaired. To a _gholam,_ women who could channel shone like a beacon, and their blood and marrow tasted all the more delectable. And why not? That was, after all, why Aginor had created them. To kill women and men who could channel.

With a shudder of revulsion, Moghedien saw that the creature's bare belly was still distended, as if pregnant. Replete with its last meal. They had happened upon a village of Ayyad – men and women who could channel. In Shara, channellers lived apart from the common herd.

Those unfortunates had not truly understood the nature of the wight who came to kill them, until it was far too late. The _gholam_ had glutted itself upon them, battening upon their blood. Another reminder that her control over it was a tenuous hold at best.

At least it had left no survivors who could identify them. "Put some damned clothes on" Moghedien snapped at it.

The _gholam_ appeared tractable – for now. "As you command, _Mia'cova_ " it lisped in its childlike voice, stooping to its bundle of clothes, before turning back to her with a questioning look in its eye. "Are you my mother, _Mia'cova_?" it asked, sharply.

"Of course not!" Moghedien said, brusquely. A half-truth, at best. Worse, the _gholam_ knew she had lied.

How intelligent were they, really? The Spider did not know. Perhaps nobody truly had. Not even Aginor. Generally, they were only activated for brief periods of time, for a designated purpose. Understandably, they made people nervous. They were certainly apt tools, skilled at reading people's reactions and making inferences.

The gholam looked down, regarding its full stomach. "Can I, too bear children?" it asked of her. _Too intelligent by half._ In terms of age, the creature was only a few days old, with no memories of past lives to distract it. Yet it was clearly capable of inference and nuance.

The answer to its question was no, of course. There was no way Aginor would countenance the possibility of these creatures breeding, creating offspring that answered to nobody and nothing except their needs. _Gholam_ might once have come from human stock, but they were mules. Sterile. Yet Moghedien was afraid to disclose the truth to this _gholam_.

"I do not know." Another half-truth. She _didn't_ know. Not for sure. Aginor might have amended his design.

The _gholam_ made a moué of disappointment. But its gleaming eyes belied the feigned sorrow. Anger, and something else. "It makes me sad that you lie to me yet again, _Mother._ But who knows? Perhaps you are right. One day, I might find a way. I do not want to be the only one of my kind. I want to have children, Mother. Little ones of my own, that I can teach to hunt and feed."

Moghedien suppressed a shudder of disgust. _What a repulsive thought._

Artless, the _gholam_ turned away, reciting doggerel in its plaintive little voice, sloughing off the gravity of the subject, as if it did not have the requisite attention span for further contemplation.

Moghedien's lips pursed in a bloodless, secret smile as soon as the _gholam_ 's back was turned. _Child of mine, you yet have much to learn about dissembling._

* * *

Dusk emptied into a night that glittered with hard sharpness. A myriad of stars. Fragments of a broken glass, shattered upon an obsidian floor. It was time, Moghedien acknowledged. Past time. The moment she had dreaded was upon her.

The only thing that held her to her purpose was her fear of Shaidar Haran. The Hand of the Dark might be an eternity away, as he had claimed, unable to walk the paths between the Mirrors of the Wheel. Or it might be a test of her obedience, her loyalty. The latter might be unlikely to the point of impossibility. But obedience was inculcated in her being.

After all, she had brought Shaidar Haran here. If only inside her mind.

The fire Moghedienhad set crackled comfortingly in a nest of rocks. The bed of glowing coals glowed ruddy like dragon's eggs. It was a hard thing to leave the comfort of the fireside and step out, alone, into the dark.

The pressure of the _cour'souvra_ between her breasts seemed to increase, as the balance of her heart grew heavy with weariness and dread. Her closed purse held the two Darkboxes. Moghedien misliked the buffed haematite sensation of the black metal against her skin. Almost as much as the sensation that followed. _Shadow waiting._

She was ready. As ready as she would ever be.

The _gholam_ watched her, but curious as it was, it did not leave the warm safety of the fireside. It was wise enough to know that curiosity could be the father of rue.

Fingers trembling, she delved into the recesses of her purse. The two cubes of metal were apt to her hands. Eager. They were unpleasantly warm to her touch. A secret radiation, rotting what it touched from the inside out.

IF YOU TAKE A DARKBOX FROM YOUR WORLD, AND A DARKBOX FROM MINE, AND COMBINE THEM IN YOUR WORLD, THEY CREATE A DARKSEED. A BORE, BUT FROM HERE TO THERE.

Shaidar Haran's words to her. An echo in her mind.

She withdrew her hand from the bag, opened her hand. Upon her palm were the two Darkboxes. The very stars recoiled from them. Dark holes through which an unlovely intelligence looked out at the expanse with avarice.

They were moving, Moghedien noticed, with horror. As if they were two wren's eggs, incubating in the warmth of her clammy palm, ready to hatch. As she watched, the surface of them crawled with ciliae, black maggots blindly writhing. Straining towards each other like iron filings aligning around the poles of a magnet.

With a shudder of longing and loathing, Moghedien crushed them together in a clenched fist, before flinging the Darkseed from her with a cry of disgust.

The Darkseed – a sphere of lightless black, the size of a child's marble – fell upon the sand some twenty yards from where Moghedien stood with a soft, unimportant thud. She didn't wait to see it land. She remembered all too well what had happened when Beidomon and Lanfear created the Bore at the Collam Daan. The weaves for a Gateway snapped into being, and the Spider prepared herself to leap through it to safety.

Then the Gateway simply vanished, leaving Moghedien rooted to the spot, staring blankly at the empty space where the door had been. _Saidar_ vanished, too.

Reluctantly, the Spider turned to face her doom.

Where the Darkbox had fallen, there was now a sink in the sands, roughly the size of her clenched fist, into which the sands were slowly draining. Somehow unimportant. And yet, at its heart, an event horizon a few inches across that even light could not escape. A boundary demarcating reason and insanity. An hourglass measuring the life of the world.

Moghedien prostrated herself upon the ground.

A voice came from the bowels of the earth. Steeped in suppurating blackness.

I AM FREE, the Great Lord exulted.

YOU HAVE SERVED ME WELL, MOGHEDIEN. IN REWARD, I CONSECRATE YOU _NAE'BLIS._ REGENT OF THE EARTH IN MY NAME. AS A SIGN OF MY FAVOUR, I HONOUR YOU WITH THE BLESSING OF MY ESSENCE.

Moghedien howled, her feet drumming the floor in epileptic transport, keening as the True Power filled her. Strength beyond anything she had ever known. A sweet poison steeping her veins. The _saa_ was a blizzard across her eyes, a snowstorm as she scrambled to her feet.

PREPARE YOURSELF, MOGHEDIEN. THE DRAGON COMES.

* * *

It was true, the Spider saw. The tall, lean figure of Rand al'Thor faced her across the dark. Silent in intent.

Moghedien's first recourse was not the True Power.

"Kill him!" she hissed, and the _gholam_ attacked.

The night disgorged the lich. It came for Rand like a stone from a sling, upon all fours like a beast. A staccato of white, flickering through the shadows. Double jointed limbs thrashed the ground, spine undulating like a cracked whip as it hurtled towards him, low to the ground, upon all fours. A wight. Something pale and unclean that shunned the light and feasted upon the dead.

Rand's sword was in his hand, by instinct, and it was instinct, too that informed him while his conscious mind was still sorting through the disjointed, contradictory impressions. Its humanoid form, white and hairless. That all-too human face, made ghastly by the underslung, prognathous jaw jutting beneath, studded with triangular, sharklike teeth. Slitted eyes informed with cruel appetite. _Gholam._

Instead of standing his ground, Rand hurled himself aside at the last instant, rolling upon the hard-packed sand. He could not stand against it. Had he succeeded in cutting it with the Cairhienin steel, the _gholam_ would simply have trapped the sword within its own body and bitten out his throat. That would be if the creature had not succeeded in ghosting under his stroke and pulling him down to a grisly death.

Rand's desperate evasion bought him precious time. Scant seconds to formulate a plan to combat this revenant. The _gholam_ 's limbs thrashed, as it snapped at him, jaws missing his outflung arm by inches and it slewed upon the soft sands, trying to check its rush.

The next time, he would not be so lucky.

Rand's fertile mind raced. The only thing he knew of that could hurt a _gholam_ was Mat's foxhead medallion. There must be a clue in that! _Gholam_ were immune to the One Power. And Mat's medallion conferred the same property.

The _gholam,_ though humanoid in form, didn't seem human at all. Yet for all that, they reminded Rand of something. Something _wrong,_ that set his teeth on edge. They always had. It was on the tip of his tongue…

 _Foxhead._ Snakes and Foxes. The Aelfinn and the Eelfinn. The Finn fed on the ability to channel, didn't they? Were the _gholam_ human-Finn hybrids? The mutant result of Aginor's experimentation? Trollocs were humans bred with animals. Myrddraal were throwbacks from Trollocs to human stock.

Trollocs and Fades at least bore the semblance of humanity marred. A poor facsimile. A mockery of the Creator's handiwork. But the Finn were _alien._ They weren't even from the Mirrors of the Wheel, but from some parallel analogue reality, interleaved into the book of real worlds like a lost playing card. The Knave of Spades. A place with a different set of rules.

And how did you win at Snakes and Foxes? You couldn't. It was a crooked game. Rigged.

You had to cheat.

 _Courage to strengthen, fire to blind, music to dazzle, iron to bind._

Softly, Rand began humming.

The _gholam_ , crouched muscular upon its haunches poised to spring,pricked up its ears. Shook its head, trying to clear the glamour of music from its mind. As quietly as he could, Rand tracked to his right, an arc that would, in a few dozen yards bring him back towards Moghedien's fire. Stalking as deftly as ever he had, utilising all the woodsman's skills imparted to him by Tam al'Thor.

The thing couldn't see him, Rand realized. If it could, it would have been upon him, ripping out his throat. It snuffled the ground, trying to pick up his scent, but that, too was masked. Obscured.

 _Music to dazzle._

Then the wight smiled, cadaverously. Realizing it could still follow the imprint of his footsteps.

In no hurry now, the _gholam_ rose to its feet, putting on the guise of humanity. To Rand's revulsion, the monster looked like a little girl now. Wistful. Playful. Its face wreathed by a dazzling smile, guileless, guiltless enjoyment. Relishing his fear. The shadow creature had all the time it needed for its sport.

A deadly game of blind man's buff. His life the prize.

Its voice thrilled, pinked with excitement. "This is a good game! Ah! _I see you!_ "

 _No, you don't_ , Rand thought, cold purpose in the Void as he fought the atavistic dread the creature inspired in him, the urge to flee or freeze. He continued to sing, casting the spell of his voice as he edged towards the fire, towards Moghedien's camp. A journey of mere yards that felt like a hundred miles.

She – it – was only five yards from him, following his tracks unerringly. He kept his body interposed between the creature and the telltale warmth of the fire.

"I am hungry, strange man." A child's impatience, undercrawled by something dreadful. "The savour. It has been long." It laughed then, a delicate sound underscored with the scrape of long-fingered nails upon slate. "SHOW YOURSELF!" it bellowed, a Darkhound's guttural roar improbably wrenched from her small chest, then her voice was a child's once more. "Silly, silly man. Silly human." She shook her head as if bemused by his folly. Too-human eyes wide in a mockery of innocence.

It was close enough to touch him. Its crepitant breath moist upon his cheek.

With a flick of the wrist, he cast the sword to his left. Hearing the impact of the heavy blade on the soft sands, the horror that stalked him pounced.

Rand plunged his hands into the heart of the fire, snatching up two fistfuls of glowing coals as the _gholam_ rounded upon him, angry at his deception. The pain of the red-hot embers was a distant thing. Unimportant. Walled off by the Void.

To his profound relief, the nightmare creature had abandoned the guise of humanity. It was a seething, feral thing now. Unmasked. All deceptions laid aside. That was well. He was not sure that he could take the life of a child. A moment of hesitation on his part would have been fatal in this confrontation.

The lich leapt at him, hissing and snarling. Talons slashing out, its teeth sinking deep into the meat of his shoulder. His bones grinding agonizingly under the bear-trap pressure of the _gholam's_ bite, hundreds of foot-pounds of pressure. The wight'sweight dragged him down easily, a drinking hind taken unawares by a lioness. It was far heavier than it looked. Its body, dense with musculature, like a bulldog.

 _Fire to blind._

As he fell, Rand pressed the burning coals against the creature's side. Its skin caught like a candle, bursting into flames, as with the last of his strength, Rand kicked the _gholam_ away, rolling aside.

It capered, screeching, as it kindled, a blazing torch. A human figurine sculpted from flame. Skin flowing like molten wax. An unearthly cry came from it, as it reeled away, no longer interested in its prey. Rand wasted no time, rifling through Moghedien's pack, seeking something, anything that could kill or stay a _gholam._

 _Iron to bind._

There was nothing he could use. No iron, no fire. No instruments of music. Perhaps Moghedien had not known what the _gholam_ truly was, any more than he himself had.

Rand faced the _gholam_ across the campfire.

The revenant _,_ a charred horror, the remnants of its skin suppurating, cracked and peeling, was far from dead. With dismay, Rand saw that the damage the fire had wrought appeared to be mostly cosmetic. He had hurt the creature, burned away the vestigial trappings of humanity. What remained was inured to pain.

Beneath the camouflage, the disguise the _gholam_ wore allowing it to stalk undetected amongst its human prey, was an incorruptible body. Under the dermis, the apparatus of nerves that felt pain, that could bleed, that Rand had burned away, the silver-purple sheath of musculature remained intact and without blemish. An anatomical drawing, perfect in every detail.

This wasn't something fire or a sword could kill. Perhaps, if he had iron, or Mat's medallion, he could try his luck. If anything, the _gholam_ would be harder to despatch now, since it could no longer be deterred by the application of pain.

Glassy eyes sunken in the hollows of the _gholam_ 's skull stared at him in malice, promising retribution. Torment. Rand could, perhaps, prolong his life awhile by blinding the miscegenation with music once more. But not for long enough. Certainly not for sufficient time for him to learn this alien place well enough to slip away into _Tel'aran'rhiod._

Slowly, menacingly, the _gholam_ prowled forwards, a wight of shadows. It paused at the margins of the firepit between them, significantly, and instead of traversing around the blazing coals, it started across the fire with a deliberate lack of haste, bare feet upon the glowing embers.

Unarmed, Rand watched it stalk ever closer. The reek of the prowling horror filled his lungs. Scorched and blackened flesh.

 _Wait._

Softly, Rand began to sing. It was easier, now, to carry a tune than it had been when he shared a cell with Mat in the Towers of Midnight. The _gholam_ , within arm's reach of him now, suddenly hesitant, unsure, froze when it heard his song.

 _The Song of Growing._

For the first time, the wight's eyes held apprehension. Maybe even fear. Rand felt it gather itself to spring or perhaps to flee from him.

In the moment of its hesitation, Rand seized the _gholam_ fast, his fire-scarred hands clasping around the thing's wrists like manacles of steel. Instead of wrenching free of his grasp and ripping him to pieces, it fell still in his grasp as if bound in irons, head to foot.

As the Dragon Reborn continued singing, the _gholam's_ eyes became somnolent, and it sagged forward into his arms, staggering him with its weight. He felt the life leave the tormented, tormenting wight, and as its final, ragged breath released its soul, the _gholam_ crumbled instantaneously to fine ash that the wind claimed.

* * *

Moghedien had neither fled nor fought. Nor had she made a sound as she watched the contest. Rand found her in the darkness, under the eye of rock. Her eyes gleamed with what she was, the _saa_ traversing her iris mirroring that in his own.

The True Power brimmed like a reservoir of oil in the Void. A legacy from Moridin. Rand would not touch it. Never again. The cost was too high for him.

Moghedien seemed to know it. "You cannot harm me, Dragon," she declared with poised certainty. Blackness pooled between her steepled hands as she wove a snare using the Dark One's essence. "I am _Nae'blis_."

Rand reached out across the interposing space with his _ta'veren_ gift. _Then I will stop your heart as it beats, Spider._

Moghdien felt a presentiment of the Dragon's anger, like a pressure-drop before a storm. Direct confrontation had never been her way. Appalled, suddenly afraid, instead of attacking, she tore a rent in the Pattern, and hurled herself through the Gateway to safety.

Rand threw himself after the Spider, tumbling through the portal just before it snapped shut. Too late, he understood the gleam in Moghedien's eyes as he plunged headlong into a web of her fabrication.

 _Softly, softly in the shadows._

* * *

 _It was another Dreamshard_ , Rand realized as he dove into its depths. A strange soundless place, as if he had plunged into deep, cold waters. His body sluggish and unresponsive as he reached out his hand, trying to grasp Moghedien. This was her world. Her reality.

She was his only way out of here.

The Shard was an allegory. A dark well, enough daylight from above to cast shadows in which discorporeal shades crawled. Moghedien hung in front of him, an idealised, Vitruvian figure with four arms and four legs spanning an idealised, representative geometry, black hair spreading in a penumbra behind her. Stippling hard-edged triangles of shadow and light interleaved across her body, hiding and revealing her. Clothing her. Her eyes blazed.

Here, she was God.

An angry deity.

Rand could feel the manifold weight of a million gossamer strings reaching out to pinion him. Once those bound his flesh – finer than thread, stronger than steel cables – he would be at the Spider's mercy. From what he saw in her eyes, he would find none.

His clutching hand seized her wrist, and they spun, prisoners of their shared inertia, face to face.

"Unhand me, al'Thor!" the Spider snarled. She hated to be touched. Suddenly, she was no longer omnipotent in her dark domain, as the Dragon Reborn bent his own _ta'veren_ will upon her.

"Then release me from your prison!" Rand retorted, as they spun dizzyingly amongst the distorted hypergeometry of Moghedien's Dreamshard. A blurring topology of faces, edges and vertices, passing in and out through each other.

What he saw was an approximation, the best actualisation Rand's mind could comprehend of this strange place. Yet he understood enough to know that they were tumbling helplessly towards the boundary of the Dreamshard, a surface slick and hard as black ice.

They struck like a comet coming to ruin upon the surface of the Moon, a soundless impact that crushed them together like lovers. And, just for an instant, they _were_ as one.

A kaleidoscope of images, thoughts and memories flickered through Rand's mind, and he realized he was reliving the arc of Moghedien's life, fleeting impressions blurring by as fast as Mat fanning a deck of playing cards.

There seemed to be no sequence to the data, and yet Rand assimilated it all with perfect understanding, each memory seamlessly incorporated into the whole. Three thousand years of selfishness, cruelty and fear. He relived her time under the duress of Mistress Shanan, her dominion as one of the Chosen, her imprisonment in the Bore. Shaidar Haran.

Rand wished to shut his eyes against it all. But he could not stem the flow of information.

Rather than humanising his enemy, the more he saw – her cowardice, her malice, the way she shunned the Light at every turn – made him despise her all the more, even in her suffering. She wasn't redeemable. Was she? Surely not.

She trembled in his grasp, defeated. Rand did not know why that should be, only that it was so. Perhaps it was her shame that undid her. All her life laid bare, in candour. Here, there was no hiding place from the truth.

He could end her, here and now. Wanted to do it. Elayne was still unavenged. It would be justice. Yet still he hesitated.

The deluge of her memories slowed, came to a halt. A tap, turning off. Time, surely to make a decision. Justice or mercy.

There were two more memories still exigent. The last drops of water from the faucet.

Moghedien showing compassion to Elayne in Semirhage's garden. And the moment when a girl called Lilen Moiral first used _saidar._ The pivotal moment that set her upon her dark path.

Moghedien looked up into his eyes. Rand expected fear, maybe pleading. Saw only resignation.

"End me" she told him. "I have seen your life. I have seen what you are, and I acknowledge your right to judge me. Just … remove me beyond the Great Lord's grasp, once and for all. That is all I ask, and more than I deserve."

Rand felt his _ta'veren_ gift surge up within him, making him as numinous as the Sun. Too bright to look upon. _Tel'aran'rhiod_ was _his_ place. Not Moghedien's, for all her subtlety. A light that burned away the shadows and cobwebs and all fear, breaking open Moghedien's Dreamshard and dragging her out into the judgement of the Light.

SO, YOU ARE WILLING TO ACCEPT MY JUDGEMENT? the Dragon Reborn asked of the dark woman, who shivered under the deluge of His light.

Somehow, she found the strength to look up to his blazing face. "Yes" she managed, in a small uncertain voice.

THEN, LILEN MOIRAL – I SENTENCE YOU TO LIVE. FREE OF WHAT YOU CHOSE, YOU CAN BEGIN ANEW. MAY YOU FIND AND KEEP THE LIGHT, THIS TIME.

He laid His hand upon her forehead.

This time, Moghedien's life wound backwards in truth. An unweaving of the Pattern itself, in a light clean and lucent as Balefire. Each indignity and each sin recalled to her mind one last time in succession before being forgotten.

To Rand's wondering eye – who hardly knew what was being expressed through him – he saw the ingrained cruelty and suspicion flake from her countenance, mote by mote as she became younger.

The last thing to change – as she diminished from womanhood into adolescence and became a child once again – was her hair. It had turned sin-black upon that dreadful day. The black of shadow and ashes. Now, it was blonde and fine once more.

* * *

Blinking, Lilan Moiral looked up at the dark-haired man. He was a stranger to her. Tall, careworn. Youthful and yet old with responsibility. There was a quality about him, a dignity, that set him apart, made him somehow ethereal. He should have been forbidding. Transcendent. His eyes, brilliant as aquamarine, seemed lit from within by light within light. Yet they were candid. Trustworthy.

"Who are you?" she asked, quietly. Curious. But not wary.

"My name is Rand" the Dragon Reborn replied.

He could see the name held no associations for her. She was a mannerly child, though, offering her hand, which Rand took, gently, and shook politely. "My name is Lilen Moiral." Lilen told him. "I think we are well-met."

"I believe we are well-met, too" Rand agreed, with a brief smile.

Owlishly, the girl took in her bizarre surroundings in the World between the Worlds.

"Am I dreaming?" she asked of him, shrugging, her gesture encompassing the rugged, alien Sharan landscape, the sunless light of _Tel'aran'rhiod_.

"I suppose you are, after a fashion" Rand told her. "Soon, it will be time to wake."

Her face fell, as an unwelcome thought struck her. "Will I see my father again? When I wake up?"

Rand squatted on his haunches to bring her face to eye level. His voice was grave, yet reassuring. "Lilen, I'm not sure how to tell you this. But he is gone."

Her face fell, a shadow passing across it. "Gone? Dead?"

Rand nodded, uncomfortable, yet managing to meet her eyes. Not wanting to speak a deceit, or even a half-truth. _Please, do not ask me more, Lilen. Trust me, you do not want to know._

He was surprised to see that her eyes remained dry. "Lilen. It is okay to cry, if you need to…" he began, awkwardly. Some things, Rand was both grieved and relieved to find, remained ever the same, even for the Creator's avatar.

The girl's eyes, solemn, held the wisdom of intuition. "I _am_ sad. But something tells me that it is for the best. Which makes no sense at all."

Some things were easier to accept in a dream. In _the_ Dream, most of all.

Even death, change and loss.

Rand affirmed the truth in her words with a gentle smile that touched his eyes with sympathy. _Some things are best left unsaid._ She understood in part, Rand could see as he read her face. As much as she wanted to, for now. _Some things are better forgotten._

Rand looked down at her with fond sadness. She would never know. Not unless he told her. There were no repressed memories to blight her mind. In a very real way, she had never lived that life.

After today, Rand would never see her again. Nobody but he knew the truth of her past life, the life he had closed back upon itself, a blighted, cankered flower becoming once again a blackthorn bud upon the branch, full of possibility and promise.

He had gifted her a genuine second chance. Just as he had been given one, in his turn. Rand knew that if he stayed, eventually she would be curious enough to ask, to unravel the mystery surrounding her origins. And he would have to tell her. Better instead that she live this second life without the spectre of Moghedien's life and deeds overshadowing it.

As Lews Therin, he had failed, and been shown grace. He had failed as Rand al'Thor, too. But the Wheel wove, and he'd managed to do a little better the second time around. _Fail again, Lilen Moiral. But this time, fail better._

There was grace.

Forthright, she turned back to him. "And what will I do now? I had no other family. No place to go."

"Well" Rand said, thumbing tobacco into the bowl of a long-stemmed pipe, thoughtful. "I know a couple of goodfolk who would love to take you in. Lan and Nynaeve. They have a son already. A fine young man. And a baby girl on the way…."

"I might like that" Lilen allowed, her words running eager over his. "I never had brothers or sisters. What are they like, these friends of yours?" Lilen asked, interrupting. "What do they do?"

"Ah" Rand began, chuckling softly as he lit his pipe. Children were candid, and surprisingly resilient. Ever looking forward, not back. "Well, that's a tale and a half for the telling. Nynaeve's an Aes Sedai. Do you know what that is, Lilen?" He grinned warmly, seeing an exuberant excitement upon her face as Lilen nodded eagerly. "Maybe, one day, you might choose to follow in her footsteps. As for Lan, well, after my father Tam, he taught me most about what it is to be a man…"

* * *

It was dawn, clear and pristine when Rand returned to the Sharan highlands. If there was a choice, if you had the luxury of time, some chores were better approached in the cold light of day, after a few hours of sleep. Some tasks needed a clear mind. He had learned that long ago, in the Two Rivers. Nothing he had seen since had disabused him of that wisdom.

Looking at it another way, that was strategy. _Pick your ground._ If you had to face the Dark One, best do it with the sun at your back.

The Lord of the Morning looked down upon what Moghedien had wrought. A sinkhole in the earth, an aperture into depths beyond imagining.

The camera of the human eye and mind interpreted what it saw as a gleaming, brimming blackness, the slick black-ice rime of a null sphere. It had a glamour that seduced. A lidless eye – all pupil – that beckoned the unwary, fascinated them with the darkness of their own reflection.

The thirsty hollow was now the size of a human head. The sink had grown over the long night, drawing in the surrounding particulate, grain by grain.

 _Of course it had._

It was appetite incarnate. It could never be satiated.

As the Dragon Reborn watched, a single speck of grit, perched precariously upon the lip of the funnel, lost traction, tumbling into the wormhole. Its freefall was arrested by the surface of the event horizon. Frozen in stasis. An eternal mote upon the Dark One's lidless eye, falling forever into the yawning gulf beyond. Or instantaneously annihilated. A paradox. Both were true, or neither were. Time had little meaning, here. Hope, even less.

 _The worm never dies, and the fire never goes out._

Rand shivered.

Rand had thought his work done at Shayol Ghul. He should have known better than that. Lan had given it to him straight. _You fight, so that you may live to fight again._

It was what it was, and he had better make the best of it. Rand squared his shoulders, a working man readying himself for arduous labour. A thankless but necessary task, something which would take him until nightfall and beyond. Filling in a cesspool. A plague pit.

The Dark One was silent. Watching. Waiting.

Once more, Rand searched within for the strength that was in him, the power that lay behind him. Not the One Power, but something deeper, truer, beyond even the _ta'veren_ twisting of chance. The breath of the Creator's spirit, perhaps, carrying the word of His will. Using the _ta'veren_ talent was akin to prayer. A thing that worked best when it aligned with the intent of the Creator.

A voice, quiet in his mind, forestalled him.

NOT YET. AND NOT FOR MANY AGES YET TO COME.

Denied, Rand found a sudden resentment rising in his breast. _Why not?_ he railed at the Creator, in his mind. _Why permit me to fetter the Dark One, just to free him once again? It mocks and sets at naught the sacrifices we made! Were three Ages of war, pestilence, torment and death not enough for you? Have we not suffered enough? Why do you hate us so?!_

Rand did not expect an answer. It was, after all, a question he had been asking, without reply, all the days of his life. Why should he be answered now?

The rock formation above whose frowning arches took on the semblance of a face, assuming an unearthly pallor, becoming transparent to a great Light that blazed out of it. The Light waxed, grew stronger, greater than anything any mortal could bear, and with a choked cry, Rand fell to his knees, pressing his face against the floor in an agony of numinous dread, longing for the Presence to pass over him.

WHO ARE YOU, SON OF MAN, TO QUESTION MY DESIGN? WILL THE CLAY SAY TO THE POTTER "WHEREFORE AM I MADE THUS?"

WERE YOU THERE WHEN I RAISED THE FIRMAMENT OF THE HEAVENS, AND ROLLED BACK THE DEEP BETWEEN THE STARS? WHERE WERE YOU TO SEE WHEN I SHAPED THE BONES OF THE LAND, AND KNIT THE SINEWS OF TIME AND SPACE UPON MY LOOM?

The stones themselves groaned under the weight of glory, as if the land itself was, for a finite time, a fragile mortal vessel housing an illimitable Spirit. Only able to endure that awful indwelling because that was His will.

I WILL NOT ANSWER YOUR QUESTION. IT HAS NO ANSWER THAT YOU ARE ABLE TO FATHOM. IT IS NOT THE PURPOSE OF THE MADE TO INTERROGATE THE MAKER. ONLY TO WORK OUT THEIR SALVATION WITH FEAR AND TREMBLING.

That dread countenance crumbled into dust. There was no body, however great, that could house the Infinite. Only the Purpose behind the Light remained, and those weighty words continued to rain down upon the Dragon Reborn. Rand groaned in an agony of doubt. _Have I failed?_

 **FEAR NOT** , the Creator's Voice commanded of him. I AM WELL-PLEASED IN YOU, RAND AL'THOR. EVEN WHEN YOU STUMBLED, MY STRENGTH WAS MADE PERFECT IN YOUR WEAKNESS. YOU TOOK UP THE BURDEN I PRESSED UPON YOU WITH A READY HEART, SO THAT OTHERS WOULD NOT HAVE TO SHOULDER ITS WEIGHT. YOU CARRIED IT FURTHER THAN ANY WHO CAME BEFORE YOU.

NOW THERE IS BUT ONE TASK APPOINTED TO YOU, ERE YOU GO TO YOUR REWARD.

Then the Presence passed, leaving only a waiting land. A breeze arose, a drawn breath ending a long, penitent silence.

Slowly, Rand arose. Brushed the dust from his clothing. Looked down at the Bore where the Dark One cowered from the Light.

 _When the time comes around,_ he resolved, _I will be ready once more._


	59. Chapter 59: Ten

**Chapter 59: Ten**

The canvas of the night was peeled back by a yellow fingernail of moon, exposing the glossy underbelly of clinging low clouds, dragging a rough-haired brushstroke of cardamom and cadmium across the bilious blues and blacks. The stone walls of the bothy broke up the skyline, a regular charcoal outline standing proud of the hilltop ridge.

Sada had found a relatively comfortable hiding-place in the chimney-stack of the farmhouse, the point where two flues on opposite sides of a central wall met in an upside-down Y-shape, which her legs straddled. Comfort was relative. She had known many such places over her short lifespan. She was a little grimy where caked soot had rubbed off on her clothing and skin, but her bolthole was relatively spacious. It was cold, though. Draughty. No getting away from that.

The Bloodknife quietly rifled through her pack by feel in the dark, finding the waxy, waterproofed surface of a bundle of explosives, a bundle of Illuminator's fireworks tied together. She hefted it in her hand, a package weighing a few pounds. It wasn't going to be enough to destroy the building. Its walls were dressed stone two foot thick. _Pity._

She'd have to do this the hard way.

The Malkieri built their dwellings with defence in mind. A wise precaution, considering the proximity to the Blight and the horrors that dwelt within. This hold was a strong place – windows high-up and too narrow to admit a body, and it boasted a peel-tower with a flat roof and crenelated battlements.

The lookout was manned, of course. Garrisoned by a score of black-feathered _Tsorov'ande Doon_. A murder of crows. That knowledge changed everything. Changed Sada's priorities. Male channellers were a higher-value target than levelling this enemy outpost. The woman who had sent her understood that the strength of a defence was in the hearts and sinews of its defenders, not bricks and mortar.

 _Trigger the weapon. Kill the Asha'man. Give the signal to attack._

Hardly daring to breathe, Sada's deft, clever hands found the second item her pack contained. The doomsday weapon was an unprepossessing thing at first glance. A shank of metal six inches in length, with a flattened head like a roofing-nail, sparkling with the cheap, bright glitter of tin. The Bloodknife handled it reluctantly. It wouldn't harm her, she had been told. Wouldn't appear to do anything much. All she knew was anything involving the One Power was best avoided. The worst moment in her life had been being tested for the ability to channel with the _a'dam_ leash. Fearing the collar would close about her neck, fating her to a living death.

 _Had_ been. Until losing Dar.

The object was called a Dreamspike, she had been told by her handlers. Well, that was okay with her. She didn't intend spending much of the time remaining to her asleep, in any case. You let your defences down when you dreamed, and then you woke up and remembered that Dar was dead, and everything had changed, irrevocably.

It was time to activate the Dreamspike. It might look like tin, but in her hands, it bore the soft, smoky finish of a pewter tankard. Slightly oily to the touch. Taking a deep breath, Sada depressed the head of the nail with the ball of her thumb. Felt the 'click' of the Guardian activating, a soft, unimportant sound. Nothing seemed to have changed. Was it working?

She resisted the temptation to fiddle around with the arcane device, returning it to her backpack. Returned her attention to the bundle of explosives. There was a reassurance in the familiar. In working with weapons and tools she had trained with. Routine was another cornerstone of sanity. Self-comforting.

Sada used her knife to trim the detonation cord to a stub an inch and a half long. Coiled the remaining priming cord into a neat double loop. Placed cord and explosive back in her oilskin pack, and shrugged it onto her back. It was time to climb.

Sada shinned up the chimneystack, taking her time in order to move quietly whilst dislodging as little soot as possible. Her educated fingers found crevices in the stone and mortar. An easy climb for her, but she gave the task her full attention. Carelessness had taken more lives than the plague.

Careful as a rabbit nosing out of its warren, she peered out of the top of the chimney, taking her bearings. The next part of the ascent was tricky. To get to the tower, she had to run along the apex joist of the roof, a slippery balance-beam, braving the dark and a playful, uncertain wind, a Knave of Cups that would think her death a jolly jape.

Experimentally, Sada placed the sole of her booted foot upon the slick, damp wood. She rehearsed the traverse in her mind. _Slowly._ But not too slow. That was where hesitation crept in. One wobble here, on this black-ice surface, and she would fall.

One foot in front of the other. She could do this. Nothing to it.

The first step was the hardest, leaving the safety of the chimneystack and stepping out into the gulf. She spread her arms for balance. Took a second step. A third. Concentrating upon her breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Exhaling as her feet fell.

The further towards the middle of the joist she got, the more Sada felt the wood quiver at her footfall, the beam sagging appreciably under her weight. The wind rose, and she made the necessary corrections, minute adjustments, bracing herself against a shelf of air.

The wind dropped abruptly at the worst possible moment, mid-step, five feet from the wall of the tower, leaving her wobbling, foot skittering like grease upon the griddle. Sada threw herself forward, starfishing her body.

Impact with the wall knocked the breath from her body, but she hung on grimly like a _gara_ lizard, hands finding purchase upon a lip of stone as her feet sought traction below. For a long moment she froze, hardly daring to breathe, sure that she must be discovered. That was Bloodknife training. Anything less than perfection would be punished.

Incredulous, Sada heard the bantering voices of the men above. They were completely oblivious. Voices slurred with alcohol. As if they thought themselves secure upon their perch simply because they could channel the One Power. _Unbelievable._

The knowledge that the _Asha'man_ were prey to such simple human failings as arrogance and complacency fortified the assassin. _This will be good practice,_ Sada told herself. _Preparation for the day I cut down the man who killed Dar._

Their well-fed laughter was a provocation to Sada as she climbed, a shadow of ill-intent crawling the wall. It was men like these that had killed her sister. Who thought they had the _right_ to end a woman's life as though she was nothing. Men who deemed themselves as gods! Well, Sada would teach them different!

At that moment, the Last Orphan decided against using the petard to destroy them. The firework was too impersonal. Besides, she didn't need it. Not for these _da'tsang_.

The Bloodknife rolled over the coping of the wall. There were ten dark-cloaked _Tsorov'ande Doon_ upon the tower-top. Most of them were seated, backs braced against the wall to hide from the bitter wind. Their only concession to proper discipline was the absence of a warming fire that would have ruined their night vision. Instead, they had been passing round a bottle of alcohol – rum or arrack by the smell, Sada judged.

Her flensing knife cut left and right, opening the throats of the two _Asha'man_ unlucky enough to be seated with their backs to her. Her next targets were the two soldiers who were nominally keeping watch, the only two men standing upright.

The man facing in her direction froze, his hindbrain processing the sepulchral blur of her motion and the quicksilver flashing of her long knives as incipient threat, his mouth opening in slow motion even as his right hand scrabbled for his sword.

Sada's left hand knife was a crescent of silver, opening his throat and cutting off his cry as she ducked into the lee of his long-limbed body. Gripping his collar with her off-hand, she pulled him forward into a dynamic hip-throw, spilling his body into the path of a group of her opponents as they scrambled to their feet, their dying comrade now an obstacle.

The other standing sentry had been facing the wrong way, and her twin knives punctuated his broad back in a staccato rhythm. _Kidney, kidney, lung, lung, heart._ He collapsed to his knees as she rounded his body to face yet another adversary. Judging from the nonplussed look upon his face, he'd tried to do something to her with the One Power, and been unable. _Can't get it up? Too bad._

 _Five down._

A pair of the dark-garbed channellers had their swords out, faces drawn and nervous as they came for her. In truth, Sada underestimated them, assuming from their sluggish collective response to her assault that they would be poor opponents.

She took a gash across the ribs from a Borderlander with braided hair for her pains, too slow in twisting away from a slashing swordform even as she planted her right-hand dagger through the heart of his fellow, spinning upon her heel as he pressed his assault, left-hand blade parrying a lunge, right-hand knife severing the tendons of his forearm. Nerve strike to the elbow, the pain incapacitating the _Asha'man_. Right-hand knife under the armpit. _Seven._

It seemed they weren't unskilled with the sword. Just over-reliant upon the Power. _Fools._

Three left. Whatever skill they possessed with the sword, they were ill-trained as guards. Not a one had thought to raise a cry to alert others to her presence. Silent, they closed in upon her, long swords stabbing out.

* * *

With a groan of agony and effort, Sada dragged herself out from under a pile of bodies. Breath wheezed from her chest, her aspirations shallow. She had taken a sword through her left lung, just missing her heart. The sword still transfixed her, the lung slowly deflating.

Her skin felt clammy. Her clothing stuck to her, saturated with blood. Not all of it hers. Her right leg dragged, lifeless. She was finished. Done. Mind you, so were these arrogant fucks.

 _Ten._

 _I'm sorry, Dar. Looks like I'll be seeing you sooner rather than later after all._

There was one more thing left for her to do. She still needed to give the signal. Agonizingly, Sada crawled towards her pack, leaving a smear of her own blood upon the stone flags.

With numb, unresponsive hands, the Last Orphan unwrapped the petard. The incendiary device was plump with promise. Fat tubes of Dragon's Egg powder, packed in rolls of metal shrapnel. She could hear hasty footsteps. Boots upon the stone staircase leading to the rooftop. _Hurry._ Overriding the panicky imperative, the clear direction of her training. _More haste, less speed._

With seconds to spare, she found her flint and steel, at the moment a young woman rounded the corner of the stairwell, springing forward into action decisively. Her own age. A warrior. For the briefest moment, Sada thought it was Dar. _You came for me, D. I knew you would!_

The disappointment that followed was enormous. Sada wanted to shut her eyes against it. Sleep.

The Aiel Maiden, eyes wide with alarm, raised her spear ready to cast. "Drop the flint or die!" she warned Sada, a lioness's growl.

Sada looked up, glaring at the enemy combatant, resentment overriding fatigue as her hands tightened on the flint and steel. _You can get f-_

Everything went nova.


	60. Chapter 60: The Cusp Of Eternity

**Chapter 60: The Cusp of Eternity**

Moridin spread his arms wide, cruciform, looking up into the roiling sky above. Lashing rain plastered his clothing to his body, ran down his face like tears. Moridin paid it no heed, smiling like a seraph as the storm battered him.

He stood alone upon the blackened summit of Dragonmount. Claiming it for his own. Instead of abating, the winds gathered around him, crowning his ascension in a cumulus that fell in upon itself even as it climbed thousands of feet into the air, ripping the sky apart, dragging the delicate herringbone tracery of cirrus clouds that had predominated inwards into an all-consuming vortex.

Lightning struck once, twice and then incessantly around where he stood, a jagged crown of thorns that left him untouched. The pillar of cloud increased. Thickened. Grew black and pestilent. The blistered, glossy crimson-black of a corrupted wound. It was not the Power. It was Moridin. _He_ was the lodestone, and the pain of worlds – of all worlds – was being written in him and through him.

Moridin could feel it. Taste it. He stood on the cusp of eternity. And he did so alone.

 _Embrace Death._

The balance of the cosmere, the spindle running through all the worlds, shuddering with unbearable tension. The universe spinning round their chosen axis, a cell nucleus on the point of mitosis. Rand al'Thor the north pole, somewhere above. Moridin its southern counterpart below.

All those Mirrors of the Wheel, but really only two that mattered, for all the illusion of an infinity of choices. Two Keystone worlds. One raising up the Dragon Reborn, the other Moridin. Two avatars. Two champions. Two visions. Light. Darkness. The rest variations on these dipole themes. And the raw, bleeding edge where the multiverse was fraying, tearing itself apart along the seams. _Tel'aran'rhiod._

Two dreams, one sung by the Creator, another vomited from the mind of the Dark One.

The metaphor of a cell dividing was an incomplete one. The strain between the competing, irreconcilable realities would result in reality fracturing. Without the anchor of _Tel'aran'rhiod,_ for sustenance, providing the medium for change and growth, the worlds breaking free of the World of Dreams would be orphaned. Entropy, time itself would stop.

It had been happening since the Last Battle, over and over again. A countable infinity of worlds dying, one by one, as they broke free. A shower of sparks from iron struck on the anvil becoming cold, lifeless embers. Frozen, timeless memorials, jettisoned into the null space of the Cosmere.

There could be no compromise, no cohabitation. One conception would prevail, or the other. Else, the Wheel of Time would cease to turn. The multiverse itself would be stillborn.

For all the aeons, the balance-beam had tilted in the favour of the Dragon. Even _Shai'tan_ had elected the Dragon over Moridin, seeking to suborn the Light's champion rather than raising Moridin up. But now the momentum had shifted between him and Lews Therin.

Moridin had felt the scales tip as he stood over his unconscious adversary. Wrested the Ring of Tamyrlin from his unfeeling hand. All this, he understood in part, the knowledge drawn from a wellspring of instinct that ran deeper than free-will. Moridin perceived a little more now. Saw a little more clearly. He and the Dragon were conjoined. One body, two souls. Together, they were the Fisher King with blinded eyes, groping through the fog.

Moridin looked down, half-expecting to see the stigmata from Fain's dagger, to feel his blood running from a wound in his own side. _That_ was how much he identified with the Dragon Reborn.

They were two lifelong enemies who had been fighting so long they unknowingly guided the other's sword. Their war a choreography of white and black and red. Souls and bodies scarified by each other's blades, their blood commingled like brothers. Where one began, the other ended.

Rand al'Thor – it was still hard to see the man as anything other than Lews Therin, but the distinction was important, somehow – had decided, with some conscious intent, to help Moridin. An unfathomable decision. Had repaid hate with Healing. A key, turning in a lock that had released some untapped potential within Moridin.

The merest foreshadow of that power had proved sufficient to cast Rand out of consciousness. To blind the mind of one who had wrestled with _Shai'tan_ himself at Shayol Ghul.

Rand al'Thor was something more than Lews Therin.

Moridin, too, was becoming something greater.

He was no longer Ishamael, though he carried those memories, the crushing weight of those deeds. The transubstantiation did not abate the anguish, nor negate the stark reality of the choices he had made and the pain he suffered as a consequence.

If anything, the dissonance in his breast was a sharper contrast of light and dark. Its ragged edges whetted even more keenly. His soul transfixed in a balescream of agony.

But he was sane. The Dragon's Healing had been torment. But he embraced it. Learnt its contours like the body of a lover.

He was still Moridin. Death in his touch. A man who had split his personal atom. And he could never again be Elan Morin. He would need a new name, in time, when the metamorphosis was made complete in him. When he understood.

The Wheel turned.

Rand al'Thor would come to him now. To dance amongst the lightnings amidst the broken stones upon his own grave. He could not stop Moridin. The forces that gathered here, at the eye of all worlds would scour the Dragon Reborn away if he tried. Yet he would come. The tidal pull between them would bring him here. It was time.

* * *

He turned, into the teeth of the snarling storm, knowing Rand al'Thor had joined him at last upon the heights. Welcomed his adversary with a brother's smile, and with steel in his hand, choosing the heron-marked blade of _Justice_ , rejecting the yawning, yearning maw of obliteration gaping above. An effort of will, denying all that power so apt to his hand.

A thrill of pleasure coursed through Moridin's breast. The heady abandonment of intoxication, of releasing control. Rand al'Thor would die today, or he himself would. Not as pawns on the _sha'rah_ board in the great game of Light and Dark, without agency. But as free men, settling a debt of honour.

The Creator and the Dark One had their dreams, their schemes. And so did Moridin, though he was but a man. If the Dragon Reborn was going to die at his hand, it would be in the time-honoured way. He had dreamed this moment a hundred thousand times.

The old ways were the best.

Rand mirrored him, close as a shadow stalking, the sword of Laman bright morning in his fist, secured to his wrist by a workmanlike leather thong. The blade was only steel, repurposed to his hand with craft and care by an Aiel woman who disdained the sword, rejected everything it stood for.

A pledge of love, nothing more. But it served to imbibe the white lightning that danced above. The brilliant gleam of Cairhienin steel was answered readily by ebon black, as the damascened blade _Justice_ drew upon the churning, lightless abyss above. Hawkwing's heavy blade felt right in Moridin's hand. There was a finality about it. _Closure._

Their feet tracked quiet on a surface soft as a bed of down. Not snow. Ash. Below gaped the wound Lews Therin had gouged into the earth, welling with magma. Steam rose, chilling as it ascended, before precipitating into a dense cloudbank.

The Dragon Reborn spoke first. "They told me not to come, Elan. But I needed to be here."

Their eyes met. "Then you are a fool, Rand al'Thor!" Moridin shouted over the broiling thunder of the storm. This was a place for truth above all things. The dark man leaned into his stance, bracing _Justice_ in a two-handed grip. "Yet you were right to come."

Rand's reply was quiet, carrying to Moridin's ears by some trick of the wind. "I have faith. Or I am a fool. I guess we will find out which of us holds the balance of truth."

Moridin's heart felt a bitter spur, Rand's words finding an unexpected vulnerability deep within. A chink in his armour. The wound, clean and bitter, incited anger. "Faith is for children, Dragon!" Moridin raised Justice aloft, pointing at the dark star above, the balance of unacknowledged grief. " _That_ is reality, Lews Therin. Reality enough for the both of us. Is that enough truth for you?"

Moridin took a shuddering sigh, suddenly weary of it all. "Walk away," he told the Dragon. "Learn wisdom. Your friends are right. You should not have come."

"You know I won't, Elan." Rand al'Thor uttered, stern with decision. The brooding hurricane above responded to the quiet intent of his words, a bristling snarl of distortion.

The air between the two men was redolent with tension, the blood-and-copper tang of ozone presaging violence, raising the hairs on Moridin's neck. The lightning marched closer, interleaving ribbons of white leaving ultraviolet afterimages on the retinas of the protagonists. Moridin's fury – cold and close to the surface – a glacier, gathering momentum.

"Then you die" snarled Moridin, surging forward.

The two men met with a great shout, blows falling like sleet. Unpremeditated. Uncompromising. _Lightning of the Three Prongs,_ succeeded by _River of Light_ then _Kingfisher Takes the Silverback_ in near-instantaneous succession, both men unconsciously mirroring the other.

The last form, a lethal thrust delivered simultaneously by both men ended with the blades somehow, improbably, deflecting instead of each man transfixing the other, and the combatants spun apart, turning full circle to face each other in the open form, balanced upon one leg, a yard apart. A training-form. _Heron Wading in the Rushes._

It was clear from both men's face that neither could say which instinct had made them choose the redundant form. One that was of no utility except for practicing balance. One that left the swordsman vulnerable to almost any attack.

There was nothing to choose between the two of them. The Pattern itself would not do so. Some apotheosis of chance, something beyond the weaving of _ta'maral'ailen_ or _ta'veren._ They could exchange blows endlessly, negating each other, free to choose any form, but in exercising that freedom, could only shadow each other, duplicating each other's movements. Indistinguishable, one from the other.

 _Balance,_ concluded Rand al'Thor, breathing heavily. _Him and me._

Yet Moridin was right. It had to end. For the sake of the world. For the sake of all the worlds.

Slowly, deliberately, Rand sheathed his sword. _Folding the Fan._

Leaving himself vulnerable.

A nameless terror gripped Moridin's heart. A terrible doubt. _It must not be this way!_ With a despairing cry, impelled by he knew not what, the man who had been Elan Morin slashed out with _Striking the Spark_ , the Void abandoning him in that moment.

The turmoil inside his breast, mirrored in the boiling caldera overhead, lightning striking thrice upon the summit of the mountain itself, shattering rocks. The air filled with the brimstone stench of burning rock.

With an agonising lack of haste, Moridin watched his sword inch towards his foe, not knowing in that frozen moment if he wanted the blade to strike home. Saw Rand twist away upon instinct, the blade lancing deep into his bicep rather than his chest. A cruel, maiming blow. Then the force of the lightning interposed between them, its heavy hand throwing them apart.

Moridin picked himself up, scraping up _Justice_ from the stones in a rasp of iron. His ears were ringing. Rand was already upon his feet, facing him. The long Cairhienin blade was in the Dragon's right hand. His left arm hung limp by his side. An impediment.

Blood – shockingly bright – upon the pallid grey ash. An accusation.

Moridin stepped back, lowering his own blade. "Bind up your arm" he told the Dragon, his voice harsh, and then, uselessly, truthfully: "I'm sorry. I hardly knew what I did."

Face pale, Rand only nodded, expressionless. Bound up his arm with the linen of his shirtsleeve to staunch the blood flow. Moridin waited, head bowed, but he did not sheath his own blade, nor wipe the blood from it.

There was no turning back.

The Dragon Reborn tied off the makeshift bandage with a decisive yank. Levelled his blade, his one-handed grip delicate about its hilt, a painter with a brush. "Come at me, Elan."

Moridin growled, boots hammering the ground as he hurtled towards Rand, wanting to bring a swift conclusion. To expunge the guilt of the dishonourable wound he had dealt Rand with a weregild of blood. His or the Dragon's. It didn't matter which.

Moridin swung _Justice_ aloft, bringing the sword down in a swift and heavy blow, with the advantage of a second hand on the hilt augmenting the force of the stroke.

Rand wasn't there to meet it, evading _Hawk Spots the Hare_ with the nimbleness of _Cat on Hot Sand_ , threading a riposte so exquisitely slow that Moridin mis-timed his counter, parrying too early, almost passing Rand's blade by. Only the most desperate evasion saved Moridin's neck, the dark man wrenching his head back from the lancing stroke.

Rand menaced him, his tempo measured. Deliberate. The Dragon's blade tracked him unerringly, arm fully extended like a fencer, point threatening the hollow of his throat. Moridin didn't think the Dragon was reading him. It was more like Rand had fought this battle before.

A desperate, graceless hack from Moridin failed to drive away the threat of the sword-point, buzzing about his face like a flying insect. Leopard's Caress ended the fight as a contest, the clawing swipe of Rand's blade twisting the blade from Moridin's hand.

The Dragon's sword at his throat, Moridin watched him kick _Justice_ away, out of his reach. Backed up, Moridin felt the stone under his bootheel crumble, grit rattling away, falling into the emptiness behind him. He had reached the extremity. Another step would take him over the edge of the precipice.

Oblivion. _Freedom._

Moridin was laughing. Tears streaming down his face.

"Look up, Dragon!" he sneered, taking in the ouroboros snarling above. "Take a good long look! Think you that the power gathering above is yours to command? Plunge your blade in my chest, Rand. Do it! I'll take you with me!

We won't just destroy Dragonmount this time. I will plunge a sword of Fire through the heart of your _world_! I'll excise the cancer that is Corruption once and for all!

 _You_ fail once again! Because you still want to live, madman! You aren't willing to pay the ultimate price. Not just your life, but the life of your world. I'd rather crack it like the shell of an egg than suffer the taint that infects it for another minute!"

"You could" Rand stated, collected and calm. "You won't."

Moridin's expression was incredulous. Contemptuous. "Oh, that's _good,_ Lews Therin! What possible reason can you imagine I would have to spare you, still less this obscenity – your best attempt at a world free of the Dark One's touch? Faugh! At least the Dark Worlds, for all their foulness, are not an exercise in hypocrisy!"

Rand met Moridin's eyes with conviction. "Beneath your sneering, you know that the good is _always_ worth fighting for. You must understand, as I do, that even the Dark One is part of the Creator's design. That without Evil to provide friction, the Wheel could not turn. A world without Chaos would not be a living thing.

You just lost faith. Found one betrayal too many. I am sorry for it. Sorry for my part in setting you upon your path.

Your existence is not a mistake, or a cruelty, Elan. The Light has a plan for you. Greater than you can guess. Something that transcends the evil you have done, and the evil done unto you. But nobody can make you choose it."

Rand took his own sword from Moridin's throat, weighing it in his hand for a long moment. It had been a burden. It was time to lay it down.

"I don't need it, brother" the Dragon concluded finally, lofting the heavy blade over his head, before casting it over the cliff's edge. The blade tumbled, swallowed up by the mists far below. Neither man heard it land. "Do what you must."

Deliberately, the Betrayer of Hope swept up _Justice_ from where it lay upon the ground.

"This is on you, Dragon" Moridin menaced him, levelling the sword like an accusation. "Your blood upon your own head."

Rand looked back at him, dauntless. "Your choice, Elan. Dying is easy. Living is hard. Kill me, kill yourself, kill us both – it is all the same. The same facile choice you have made over and over down the years. Or you can take the first painful steps towards rehabilitation. Towards redemption. Knowing that with each step along the righteous path, the pain increases tenfold, as we lay our heart open to the Light.

What will you have, Elan? Make a choice. Thrust your sword into my heart. Or take my hand."

There was a desperate hope in the eyes of Elan Morin Tedronai as he hesitated, looking down at Rand al'Thor's proffered hand. Back at the familiar comfort of the blade in his own left hand.

"I am made to kill" he told the Dragon Reborn, wild-eyed, tears of hopelessness raining down his face, though he uttered not a sound in his grief. "That is my purpose. That is why I am."

Rand shook his head forbiddingly. "Not my world. Not today."

Elan's haunted gaze, tormented with longing. "The Song of Growing is not for me."

"Then you will find your own song" the Dragon Reborn pledged.

Blindly, like a drowning man, before he could change his mind, Elan Morin groped for Rand al'Thor's handshake.

Their palms clasped. One with the raw stuff of Chaos marshalled above. One with the permanence of the ground beneath their feet. Channelling the forces pent above. Discharging all that dark majesty and might through Rand into Elan – making them for a breathless heartbeat a conduit for all the wrath of a world. All that tempestuous power pouring into the sword clasped tightly in Moridin's off-hand in a single stroke of lightning.

Rand felt something inside him rip free, and he yielded it up gladly. It was nothing that he would miss.

Moridin looked down at the blade of _Justice_ for a long moment, the conduit of all that power, and its final repository. It remained just a sword. An heirloom. The workmanship of fallible, fallen humanity. Yet somehow, he knew it was something more, now.

Just like him.

Rand took a deep breath, filling his lungs. Looked up into a sapphire sky of unparalleled clarity.

He was lessened. There was a freedom in that. No longer was he the Dragon Reborn. No longer was he _ta'veren._ He could feel the Lews Therin memories dissipating too, like mist at sunrise.

He was just a man, again.

Free to live. Free to love.

He turned to Moridin one last time. The other man bore his scrutiny, a tall, dark-haired man, whose broad shoulders now stooped under an immense burden. _Duty, heavier than a mountain._ "I reckon the debt is paid, Elan," Rand al'Thor told him. "Be seeing you."

He was going home.


	61. Chapter 61: A Dance In The Dark

**Chapter 61: A Dance in the Dark**

Beca Surehand watched the blossoming explosion, eyes narrowing against the sudden conflagration of light. A yellow candle-flame climbing high into the night that briefly illuminated the dead ground outside the makeshift fortification. A half-second later came the thunderclap report, a flat, hard detonation.

The Banner-General allowed herself a moment for reverie, the briefest of reprieves for the fort's beleaguered defenders as she closed her eyes to restore her night vision. She used the precious allocation to offer a heartfelt prayer for the soul of Sada the Bloodknife. Sada and Dar had been known as the Orphans. A legend amongst the ranks of the Air Command, their names a source of sleepless nights amongst the Empire's foes.

It was still possible that Sada had somehow survived her dangerous mission, and lived to seek her vengeance upon the enigmatic 'Dark Man'. If so, then Beca wished her luck. More power to her elbow!

But the Banner-General had seen the woman's eyes before she sent her to her death and deep down, Beca knew the truth. Perhaps better than the assassin herself did. The Last Orphan was looking for a good place to sell her life dearly. She would not live long enough to take her vengeance. The desolate rage in the young woman's eye had told its own story.

Beca could understand that. It was not good to be alone.

 _Peace favour your sword, Sada. May the last embrace of the Mother welcome you home._

Her night vision restored, Beca raised a compact brass telescope to her eye to survey the damage. However dearly-purchased the assassin's life, the squat stone farmhouse and its square peel-tower still stood, seemingly untouched.

With the familiarity of practice, the General adjusted the focusing dial and the image she was viewing sharpened. The low intensity of light and the minute trembling of her arm conspired against her, but the Banner-General could make out the suggestion of small figures upon the rooftop. She pursed her lips in irritation. It wouldn't matter for long, however.

Beca Koukal could almost pity the defenders. They could have no conception of what it was to face the wrath of the Ever-Victorious Army. The sacrifice of Sada's violent death and the many lives she had no doubt taken before her demise was but a foretaste, a testament to their resolve and skill. Their collective intent and will.

They always thought they understood, those who set themselves against the Raven Empire throughout its illustrious history. These little kingdoms and principalities. Thought themselves sufficiently prepared to resist the invader.

They never were. Whatever cultural values they drew upon, whatever latent martial talent bolstered their ranks had never been enough in the long run, and to Beca Surehand, that proved the Seanchan ideal, the Seanchan culture was superior.

Beca Surehand didn't blame them for resisting. In their place, she would have done the same, she knew, against an incursion by some hostile power. However, it fell to her to show them their error. To chastise these people thoroughly at the first time of asking, in order to pave the way for a smooth and orderly transition and minimal loss of life thereafter as this nation was amalgamated into the Seanchan Empire.

Truth to tell, Beca Koukal looked forward to testing her mettle against the renowned Aiel and Borderlanders. She had no doubts that in the fullness of time, janissaries drawn from their ranks would be a great asset to the Crystal Throne.

Beca raised her voice. Her voice cool, sure, held the frisson of anticipation.

"The Banner will advance."

The words she spoke released her. A lifetime's worth of feeling like a square peg in a round hole, all banished by glorious certainty. All her self-doubt, all her gangly awkwardness, even her misgivings about following her patron Emperor Mordred, dispelled like a bad dream at daybreak. _This_ was what she was born for! This was who she was. This was her calling.

There was _nothing_ that could compete with this! Not working the sword. Not even the coital joy of the clouds and the rain! There was a rightness to this. A _righteousness_ , founded upon duty, sacrifice and fellowship. All that restraint, the years of dedication and self-denial unleashed in a few red minutes upon a blank canvas. The perfection of unsheathing the most deadly instrument of war the world had ever fashioned. The Ever-Victorious Army. In her capable hands, the elite banner she commanded could be a crushing mace, or a surgical scalpel.

It was time to wield the Winged Hammer.

The Banner-General had divided her men-at-arms into three deep columns, converging upon the fortification from the north, east and west. There were a thousand men in each column. They neither lagged nor hurried, moving with crisp efficiency.

Not for them the harlequin green and red quartering of the regular army, faced with gaudy gold ornamentation. Their chitinous harness of articulated plate was enamelled jasper, a viscous black the colour of blood spilt in the dark. The heavy infantry were haughty in their high-faced praying-mantis helms, their mandible crests nodding. They knew how good they were.

Flanking the deep columns, her light infantry advanced in support. Many of the light companies, though not all, bore the new muskets. These were screened and protected by lines of swift-moving steel-jacketed halberdiers, anchored by pike squares. The musketeers' weapons outranged anything the defenders could bring to bear.

In an assault like this upon an entrenched position, their role was to support the advance of the columns of men-at-arms by keeping the defenders' heads down beneath the parapet, deterring them from firing upon her heavy infantrymen.

But a Seanchan Banner-General had other weapons at her disposal. Tools of alarm and affright, designed to disrupt an enemy's defensive preparations and sow terror and panic amongst them from the onset.

Racing ahead of the implacable march of the columns of armoured men, the leonine shapes of _torm_ streaked towards the earthwork rampart the defenders had erected, breathtaking swiftness couched in muscular grace. Loosed to kill by their handlers, the _morat'torm._

She only had fifty of the beasts at her disposal, cat-clever, and twice as cruel. Intelligent enough to understand human speech, _torm_ bore a superficial similarity to the great cats found on this continent, sharing their speed and facility as ambush predators.

An example of convergent evolution, not consanguinity. _Torm_ were reptilian, though warm-blooded, armoured with copper scales like a fish. No sound presaged their swift onset, their savage growls reduced to a hoarse whisper. At a young age, each of these _torm_ had gone under the knife. A laryngectomy, removing their vocal chords.

 _Torm_ were rare, expensive. Hard to train, harder to replace, but Beca Surehand would far rather spend their lives than the lives of her men.

Harrowing the night with their voracious cries _,_ winged shapes stooped down from far above, breaking the low cloud cover that had concealed them as they banked in squadrons overhead. The _raken_ overflight overtook the column of marching men in a heartbeat, streaking past even the loping _torm._

But nothing afoot or aloft could outstrip the storm. The sky was riven, torn open in rents as lightning forked, coruscating white that branded its afterimage upon Beca's retinas.

It was no natural squall. The farmhouse and its peel tower, standing proud, received the brunt of the tempest, bolt after bolt of lightning striking home relentlessly upon its summit, so that the tower was rendered in silhouette. The Banner-General had two hundred _damane_. A hundred of these she held in reserve, against the possibility of a protracted battle, screening her rear.

The other hundred _damane_ took guard just outside the radius of effect of the Dreamspike, the _ter'angreal_ that prevented channelling that the Last Orphan had given her life to trigger in the midst of their enemies.

Half of Beca's _damane_ laboured to instigate the storm, using Air and Water to create a hungry vortex above the enemy fort. The remaining _damane_ tapped the roiling potential of the brooding thunderhead as quickly as it could be amassed, discharging the elemental energy in an incessant hail of lightning directed upon the helpless defenders.

The enemy channellers – _marath'damane_ and _tsorov'ande doon_ alike– were helpless to respond to the onslaught, the Guardian Sada had deployed supressing their abilities.

A _sul'dam,_ lightning-panelled dress flapping as she ran, presented herself before Beca Surehand, bowing with her fist pressed to her heart. An older woman, experienced. Urgency in her eyes and bearing.

"Report," the Banner-General commanded curtly.

"Banner-General, as anticipated, we have not encountered any resistance from enemy channellers. The attack proceeds as planned. Only…."

"Only what, _sul'dam?_ " Beca interjected, impatiently. "Be quick about it, woman!"

"Well… Lightning is strange here, Banner-General. There is a .. resistance. The flows do not always go where they are aimed…"

Beca rubbed the shaven side of her head, fuming. "Why bother me, _sul'dam_? _I_ don't know how to channel the flaming One Power. You need to step up! Show some bloody initiative, and solve your own problems. If lightning doesn't work, try something else! Now bugger off and get on with it! Do I make myself clear?"

Resentment in her eyes, the _sul'dam_ saluted again, and hastily took off about her duties as if her shift was afire. Beca glared after her before dismissing the woman from her mind. The _sul'dam_ 's injured expression was doubtless due to Beca's implicit suggestion that the _sul'dam_ actually channelled _saidar._

 _Sul'dam_ or _damane,_ it was still the bloody Power, as far as she was concerned! Everybody knew that nowadays. The White Tower's embassies and teachers to Seanchan-held lands had said as much, and if you read between the lines of the boilerplate responses authored by the Ministry of Truth, they didn't dare deny it anymore. Not in so many words, anyway.

It just wasn't politic to say so.

 _Well, excuse me!_

* * *

Ronam cursed as the lightning tore up the ground behind him in a fountain of earth that showered him with dirt. Close enough that he could feel the prickle of residual charge in the air. He was beginning to have second thoughts concerning the wisdom of Mat and Lan's plan.

The Taardad chief was altogether too big a man to effectively hide like a rabbit in the lee of a mound of earth. Clad head to toe in steel plate, his massive frame made a near-irresistible target for the tongues of white fire. Being broiled alive in his armour like stew in the pot was decidedly _not_ how Ronam son of Rhuarc wished to awake from the dream.

He had no option but to sit tight, though. Waiting for the Seanchan jackals to muster the effrontery to approach near enough for close quarters battle. At present, raising his head above the top of the earthworks was a good way of losing it, pot helm or no.

The wetlander infantry kept up a heavy suppressing fire with their strange projectile weapons, tubes of black iron which fired with a loud report and propelled little balls of soft lead at such velocity they punched though good steel.

Another reason not to bother with the encumbrance of armour, in Ronam's opinion, but Maitrim Cauthon and _Aan'allein_ had both insisted, and when two such experienced spear-brothers both said a thing, a wise man listened and paid heed.

A _raken_ swooped past, a bat-like silhouette against the night. The Maidens had brought several down with their bows when they came in too low. The others had learned better after that.

The winged reptile banked hard to deliver its payload, a Seanchan soldier flinging an object in his general direction. Ronam's keen eyes tracked the parabola of the object as it hit the lip of the levee above him, and tumbled down to land by his feet, fizzing.

Nonplussed, the Taardad warrior picked it up to examine it. It was a crudely-made thing, a sphere of cast iron. There was a string standing proud of it, like the stalk of a Wetland apple. That string was burning, giving off a sulphurous odour.

Ronam shrugged as he pinched out the fizzing fuse between his thumb and forefinger. The ingenuity of Wetland craftsman never ceased to amaze him. He guessed that it took a special kind of mind to conceive of such things. _An evil mind._

Elsewhere, other spear-brothers and sisters had been less fortunate. The guttural roar of the Dragon Eggs exploding was a constant counterpoint to the roll of the thunder – the percussive rattle of warriors striking spears against their bucklers. The heavy Dragon's Eggs were packed with iron shrapnel which flayed the Aiel ranks, despite the armour the Stone Dogs wore. Wretched screams unhallowed the night.

It was a night of horrors. He saw a Maiden caught by an explosion, a gout of flame and acrid smoke swallowing her up. When the smoke cleared, he saw that she still lived. Barely. Crawling towards shelter, dragging the viscera of her ruined legs behind her, slicking the earth with a trail of blood. Her face disfigured, ripped and pitted by shrapnel, an eye gouged out, leaving a weeping socket. She made a few paces as Ronam watched, appalled, before she stopped moving, succumbing to blood loss. A mercy. Better to die than live like that. Hideously maimed, a burden upon the living.

Ronam resolved that if he was so injured, he would take his own life. Better that than watch his sister-wives grieve him every day.

The Stone Dog reluctantly conceded that things could have been a lot worse, for all that his forces were pinned down behind the protection of a levee of earth instead of being able to take the dance of the spears to his foes.

Much of that was down to the Raven Prince's ingenuity. At the very centre of their makeshift hold, Malkieri labourers had deposited a huge quantity of rusted iron – ornamental wrought ironwork, anvils, broken bits of armour – in a big heap. Several hundredweight of metal. It was as if they had taken the fifth from the forges of a great city like Tear or perhaps the Dark One's armouries at Thakan'dar.

After that, some of those black-coated _Asha'man_ had gone to work, using the One Power to fuse the ferrous metal into one crude lump, using Fire and Earth. In fact, Ronam knew, they had gone further, using a variant of Aligning the Matrix to infuse the iron cache with a strong positive charge. "A lightning-rod" Mat had muttered, rubbing his hands visibly pleased with his idea.

The lightning-rods – there was another one, a long rod cast from copper that stood proud from the summit of the peel-tower that was the cornerstone of their defences – had done their work well, Ronam acknowledged, wicking away the lightning from where it had been aimed. That alone had saved hundreds of lives during the onslaught.

What was concerning was that there had been no response to the lightning attacks by the Seanchan _damane_ from their own _Asha'man._ Ronam did not know overmuch about such matters. Maybe the male channellers were simply outmatched. Or perhaps something had happened to them.

Either way, it was concerning. Ronam needed to know in order to coordinate their defence. It was hard – it was unprecedented – to expect his spears to passively endure this ceaseless battery without being able to retaliate in kind. It took a different kind of courage to just sit and take this punishment. If it continued, they would either break, or more likely come boiling over the walls of their fort in a suicidal attack upon the Seanchan aggressors.

He turned to the young man next to him. A skinny fellow for a Stone Dog, but with the scrappy pride of a bantam rooster and a cockscomb of blond hair to go with it. Such men – a little pride and a lot of determination – made the best spear-brothers. "Hey, Janduin" he shouted.

In the cacophony of battle, the younger man was oblivious to Ronam's efforts to get his attention. Rolling his eyes in irritation, the chief rapped upon the top of his comrade's helm with a gauntleted hand.

The set of Janduin's shoulders inside the suit of metal was a caricature of annoyance, as he pushed up his visor awkwardly. "Are you trying to deafen me, Ronam?" he asked of the Taardad chief. "Thanks to you, my head is ringing like a bloody bell!"

"You need to clean out your ears, young man!" Ronam responded to his surliness with gruff authority. "You're one of those .. what do you call'em? Dragon-Blooded, aren't you? The ones that used to go to the Blasted Lands to spit in Sightblinder's eye before the _Car'a'carn_ came."

There was a glow of pride in Janduin's eye. As much for the legacy of Aiel defiance as for his inheritance from the father he had never met, the Dragon Reborn. The ability to channel _saidin._ His gift, though strongly-expressed was a wilding talent, just as it had been for his sire. There had been nobody among his people to show him the way of it, and he had been reluctant to leave the Taardad to seek the knowledge he needed amongst the wetlanders of the Black Tower.

"Aye" he allowed. "That I am."

"Did you share water and shade with those … _Asha'man_ wetlanders? Have you any idea why their efforts to dance the spears have been so ineffectual?"

"I haven't been able to find _saidin_ since the battle started" Janduin shrugged. He would liefer trust his spear, in any case, rather than the One Power, but the abrupt disappearance of _saidin_ had been unprecedented in his life experience. Whether he chose to use it, or not, _saidin_ held him, and he it, and they wrestled, even in his dreams. That had been the way of it, as it was for all of his siblings since birth. Now it was gone. The loss disquieted him more than he cared to admit.

"I do not know how it is for those _Asha'man,_ if they share my difficulty or not." Truth was, Janduin didn't want to ask the arrogant but accomplished Wetland channellers, who had – to a man – either sought to recruit him to the Black Tower, or patronised him for his lack of skill. No doubt, his failings were not shared by the black-cloaks, and he had no wish to endure their mockery.

Janduin would _never_ wear a sword. No matter what his father had done. Every man was free to choose his own path. If his brother Alarch wanted to be a wetlander, to study at the Black Tower, that was up to him, too. Janduin allowed that course might even be honourable, these days, but it didn't sit right with him, and he wasn't ever going to pretend that it did.

Amongst the Aiel, the way these _Asha'man_ carried on would have earned them blood-feuds left and right, punctuated by the exclamation mark of a spear in the ribs. Janduin gave them a little latitude because he prided himself upon being a peaceable man. A _reasonable_ man. That was the mark of a man who led. A man others would follow.

A man like his father, perhaps.

Besides, Janduin knew the vaunting emotional maelstrom that came with knowing you could wield the One Power. That sense of power and entitlement in the moment when _saidin_ was in a man's grasp, and the vague feeling of shame and loss that succeeded it. A vague sense of _toh_ incurred. But just because he understood how they felt didn't mean he would willingly endure their scorn to no purpose. Better to leave them to their hubris.

Ronam's eyes were uncomfortably knowing as they read his expression. "I don't suppose," he asked, "you could get to the bottom of this for me, Janduin? Find out from these _Asha'man_ if they share in your…. difficulties, and if so how widespread the problem is?"

Janduin sighed, swallowing his liver at the prospect of dealing with the high-handed _Asha'man_. Pride was always a man's enemy. The way of _toh_ was so very hard, sometimes. "So long as you save some of those Seanchan soldiers for my spear. I'll get to the bottom of this, Ronam."

The older warrior slapped him on the shoulder with a heavy hand, approvingly. "Mind how you go," he warned. "Keep your head down, or you're liable to lose it."

The young man took off, zigzagging across the dead ground like a mountain hare. His fleetness of foot made a mockery of the fact he was dressed head to foot in Tairen steel plate. If Ronam envied him his youthful energy, what of it? There was no shame in Ronam having seen fifty summers. It meant he was hard to kill.

Ronam spared Janduin an anxious look until the youngling angled behind the shelter of the farmstead. It was an old superstition of his, long-disproved, that no harm would come to a comrade so long as he remained under Ronam's watchful eye, yet he held to it.


	62. Chapter 62: The Sword And The Dragon

**Chapter 62: The Sword and the Dragon**

Rain lashed down in torrents from the Called Storm, churning the ground into a muddy morass. It plastered the dark coats of the _Asha'man_ to their backs as they sheltered in the farmhouse. Another reminder, if one was needed, that without the One Power, they were but men.

Daved Mhor's face bruited a brooding wrath that matched the unnatural storm. Morale amongst his _Asha'man_ here was at an all-time low. He'd made the difficult decision to withdraw into the most secure place in the fortification. Husbanding his resources. Without _saidin,_ what he had was forty unarmoured swordsmen.

Daved hoped that his decision wasn't founded upon cowardice. Light, but he _was_ afraid. They all were! But forty _Asha'man_ was a force that could yet swing the course of the battle. _If saidin returned._ It was his duty to preserve the lives of his men against that possibility.

It was hard to tell which had affected his men more, losing _saidin_ or the demise of ten – ten! – of their comrades upon the roof of the tower at the hands of a single female assassin, albeit one augmented in some manner by the One Power.

The waiting was hard, too. Courage and cowardice weren't innate properties a man simply had. His actions inflamed his courage, or extinguished it, depriving the heart's flames of oxygen.

A cynical part of Daved Mhor guessed that the loss of the Power was the harder blow to take for his men. It took a certain kind of person to _want_ to be an _Asha'man._ Not to put too fine a point on it, most of his fellows were selfish seekers of power. Arrogant.

Men of violence. Weapons.

 _His men._ Forty _Asha'man._ Forty individuals. Leading them was like trying to corral a herd of bullocks. The _Asha'man_ respected primacy in the One Power above all else. Without a formal commissioned rank, it was his superior strength alone that conferred leadership upon him. Without it, he was uncomfortably aware how average he was. A mediocre swordsman. A commoner by birth. No born leader.

"One flaming woman. One!" Petar held forth, morosely, holding up a single digit in illustration. Petar was a barrack-room lawyer, always shirking and complaining. He uttered a hollow, excoriating laugh. "Four more like her, and that's the rest of us as dead as last month's kippers. Not to mention there's _thousands_ of them out there."

 _Yes_ , Daved Mhor decided. It was high time to stamp out this kind of talk. Past time. His glower reduced the complainer to a hangdog silence. Daved's voice was calm, though. Even. Almost conversational. He jabbed the other man in the chest with his index finger, indicating Petar's silver Sword pin. "What does that pin signify, Petar?"

"Well. It means that I am a Dedicated. Was." Petar clearly didn't understand, Daved saw. His face sullen. Resentful at being singled out for saying what they'd all been thinking. "I'm _Asha'man_ now, of course." There was a little pride in Petar's voice now, as he remembered his accomplishment. A little backbone. That was better.

"Then why do you – why do we – all continue to wear the Sword pin, when we have earned the Dragon? Surely the one supersedes the other?" Daved asked.

"Well, I don't rightly know, Daved" Petar replied. "It's a symbol, I suppose. Something to do with the Dragon Reborn. _Callandor_ , most like."

"No, lad" Daved Mhor corrected him, gently. "We honour the Dragon Reborn, but he was never truly one of us. But he did this much for us at the start. Reminded us that we are soldiers first and foremost. That's why he chose the Sword as our symbol. A simple soldier's weapon. Nothing to do with the Power. And a soldier fights with anything that that comes to hand. A spear. A bow. A rock. _That's_ what you are, Petar. A soldier."

His impassioned eyes took in the rest. "A soldier. _You_ are the weapon, Petar. And being _Asha'man_ – a Guardian – is about much more than the Power. Or should be, anyway.

It's not about strength. It's about resolve. And a little bit of humility wouldn't go amiss, either! Out there, there are foes that can snuff any one of us out like a candle, One Power or no. We've learned that today, if we've learned nothing else.

Men die. Ideals don't. Brotherhood. Sacrifice. How do we respond to that knowledge? Do we remain mere men – selfish, venal individuals – or do we aspire to be something more? A Power-forged sword that cannot be broken."

Daved Mhor fell silent. Such moments were not as they were in the sagas. They were more akin to that uncomfortable moment of sobriety upon waking after a night of heavy drinking. The _Asha'man_ , to a man, appeared lost in their own morose thoughts, hooded gazes private. Each man reckoning the weight of their own worth.

Petar was the only one who spoke. "Reckon there might be something in what you said, Daved" he allowed. "I'll think upon it."

* * *

A clatter of running feet announced a new arrival, in the shape of an armoured Aiel, black veil raised under the boar-snout of his raised visor. Daved felt as much as saw his comrades stifling amusement at the strange sight.

For their sake, he hoped they did not offend their guest. Aiel were notoriously touchy. The armour might look strange upon him, but the short, broad-headed spear in his right hand definitely looked like it belonged there.

Petar was the first to speak, grabbing Daved's sleeve to convey the import of his words, which he spoke in a low, urgent whisper. "Here, Daved. That's the Aiel lad I told you about. The one that holds the Power all the time. Strong lad too, even if untrained. Strong as the _M'hael_ , or very near!"

"As your fellow said" the blond-haired Aiel said, dryly, removing the encumbrance of his helmet. "I can channel. My name is Janduin, of the Nine Rivers sept of the Taardad Aiel. My clan chief Ronam sent me. He wants to know why it is that you take no part in the battle. Meaning no disrespect."

Very formal, the Aiel. _Always step lightly around polite people_ , Daved Mhor mused. Just look at the Ebou Dari. Very well spoken, and always very stabby if they felt their honour was being impugned.

"We have fought" Daved told him, a trifle defensively. "Some of us, anyway. With steel, not the Power. We lost ten of our comrades at the hands of a single Seanchan assassin, perhaps one of those 'Bloodknives' before we finally stopped her. Those of us who tried to channel found we could not."

There was a curious mix of concern and relief upon the face of the young Aiel. "I had thought … No matter. Do you think the two things are related? The assassin and the disappearance of _saidin_?"

"More than likely" Daved averred. "We can be reasonably sure that the absence of the One Power occurred before the assassin's strike. Our best guess is that somebody – most likely the assassin – activated a _ter'angreal_ that prevents channelling. Something like the Guardian in Far Madding, maybe?" It was clear that the Aiel wilder had heard of such things as his impatient nod urged Daved to continue. "Problem is, we can't find it. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Except we don't even know what we are looking for."

"You're looking at it all wrong" Janduin told Daved, bluntly. "Follow the assassin's backtrail, find the _ter'angreal._ Now, where did the Seanchan kill your comrades?"

"Upon the top of the tower" Daved told him. "But you're mad if you venture up there, lad. The _damane_ have been pounding the rooftop with Lightning. Right hazardous to your health, it is. Especially as you're, you know? Armoured. All that metal."

Janduin grinned, suddenly boyish. "Hate wearing this stuff, anyway." The young Aielman turned serious. "Help me off with it. Hurry, man! Ere the trail goes cold. We don't have a lot of time. The battle goes poorly for my people. For all of us."

"Shall I come with you?" Daved offered, reluctantly, as he unlaced the Aiel's backplate from his haubergeron. He had no wish to play chicken with the lightning – that was a game for madmen and black-veiled Aiel – but the prestige of the _Asha'man_ was at stake, and he would not be found wanting. Light, no!

"No need, wetlander" Janduin replied, with a smile that robbed his words of their sting. "You'd just be another pair of clumsy feet eradicating the marks of her trail."

* * *

The Seanchan assassin must have been a mighty warrior, reflected Janduin, appreciatively, surveying the carnage she had wrought upon the rooftop. The unnatural storm had abated, leaving a silence that made his ears ring. Unfortunately, the explosives that she had detonated had destroyed the integrity of the scene. Charred bodies and parts were strewn in a haphazard tangle, many obliterated beyond hope of identification.

Perhaps he could pick up her tracks before she arrived upon the tower top? Wetlanders were unobservant, that was axiomatic, but he doubted that the Bloodknife woman had simply strolled up to the rooftop via the stairwell. That was stretching his credulity past breaking point. It was far more likely she'd scaled the outside of the building, instead. He'd have to hope that she'd left some sign of her passage.

What would he have done, had he been her? Janduin suspected she'd infiltrated the place earlier, found a good hiding-place, and waited for the opportune moment to strike. The chimney-stack looked a likely spot. That was his best guess in lieu of evidence. It was important to keep an open mind, though.

He found indications of her passage as he looked down the side of the tower facing the chimney. There was a lip of rock, which was chipped in places, revealing a bright surface of newly-exposed sandstone. To Janduin's keen eyesight, the roofbeam below also appeared to be marked with a gouge in the wood.

It might be confirmation bias, he supposed, but to him it was suggestive that the assassin had come this way – perhaps slipping on the greasy surface of the wooden roof joist and catching herself on the lip of rock to arrest her fall, flaking off chips of rock in the process?

Mindful of not making the same mistake that the assassin had, Janduin eased himself over the crenelated battlement of the tower, beginning the descent. The stones of the tower were well-founded, the mortar between the stones hard, making it a treacherous descent, in the dark. No easy places to find purchase for his fingers or feet.

The path along the beam was equally difficult. Not to mention he had an audience of _Asha'man_ gawking up. No doubt waiting for him to fall. It was a relief to make the chimney stack. Here, Janduin found other, more subtle clues supporting his hypothesis. Miniscule flakes of stone abraded from the chimney in her descent. Whether you walked on rock or sand, you could not fail to leave a trail for others to follow.

He found a tiny scrap of cloth caught on the lip of the chimney. The same nondescript fabric of the assassin's clothing. Confirmation that she had indeed passed this way.

He lowered himself into the chimney. His long-limbed frame was a tight fit inside the chimneybreast, his elbows and knees scraping uncomfortably as he wriggled downwards, feet-first.

Matters improved when he arrived at the upside-down Y-shaped aperture, though he was forced to duck his head to avoid catching it upon the low ceiling. But he imagined it would be rather roomy in this space for the assassin judging by the information he had ascertained from the rather shame-faced _Asha'man._ A small woman, petite, narrow waist and shoulders.

The dark was total. Janduin explored his surroundings by touch and sound like a bat. He wished he had steel and flint to strike a spark. He had grown too complacent, using the One Power to produce fire. Almost, he thought to hail the _Asha'man_ , and ask if any of them had implements for producing light. The shame of admitting himself so ill-prepared would be great…

 _Wait, what is that?_

Janduin could feel something here, in the blackness with him. A nagging itch of the mind, aggravating the same part of him that ached with the memory of _saidin._ Could this be the object he sought? The _ter'angreal_? Perhaps. His mother had the Talent to ascertain the function of novel _ter'angreal._ Could he have been blessed with a similar ability?

The song of the _ter'angreal_ echoed in the gloom, mocking his inability to locate it. Impossible to find the source.

Janduin sought the Oneness, needing its clarity. With the Void, he could see the artefact through the eyes of his mind, a scribble of chalk against the black. He reached out for it and cursed as his grasping hand struck solid rock in front of his face, painfully. Yet the _ter'angreal_ was there, somewhere.

Tentatively, his fingers explored the wall in front of him. There was a loose brick. Carefully, the Stone Dog pried it from the wall, revealing a tiny recess behind. And the _ter'angreal._ A spike of metal which rolled into the palm of his outstretched hand.

Janduin hesitated, looking down at the Dreamspike. Such a small thing. So inconsequential. Yet it had cost the lives of many spear-brothers and sisters. Intuition told him what this object was. How to deactivate it. Yet mistrust of the One Power was deeply ingrained in him. What if he was wrong? What if his fumbling caused something worse to happen than merely stopping channelling?

The thought was primitive. Powerful. _Saidin_ was his oldest foe. The enemy of _ji_ and _toh._ An angry giant he wrestled every day, that grew stronger as he did. A part of Janduin had rejoiced when the siren-call of the One Power had fallen silent in his breast. The song of _saidin_ had kept his father from his family. Separated Janduin from his spear-brothers. He was better off without it.

Almost, Janduin placed the object back where he had found it. He knew the reality of his choice, on a personal level. Embrace _saidin_ , or reject it forever. But that was a selfish thought. It wasn't about him. The One Power might destroy him. But with it, he had the strength to protect others.

Taking a deep breath, Janduin's anxious fingers retracted the head of the pin, turning off the _ter'angreal._ For an instant, nothing happened.

Then _saidin_ ignited in the dark. A baleful red giant in the night sky.


	63. Chapter 63: A Blade In The Shadows

**Chapter 63: A Blade in the Shadows**

Everything was ever the same. Everything was different.

This place had drawn him. Sought him out, by a kind of mindless geomancy. A place as desolate as Moridin himself. The broken land cleaved to him. Air above and stone below saw-toothed, unkind, a study in charcoal. The dark man had never been here before. That didn't matter. It was a new place, young to him. Land that had slumbered under the sea before the Breaking. That did not signify, either. It was the right place now. That was what counted.

Where he stood, on the heights, the land fractured, a seam of shale, plates of carbon stone breaking through the thin soil, interleaved like the pages of a torn book scattered upon the ground. Below, where the river noosed the headland in a loop of iron, huddled the wind-scoured barrow-downs that had once been the city of Harad Dakar.

Painstakingly, Moridin had built a fire here, by hand. It had taken some time to find wood dry enough to burn, and lichen and dry moss to provide kindling. He could have done it all with _saidin,_ tying off a weave of Fire above the ground for heat and light if he had a mind.

He had forgone the easy way. The spark of One Power that had ignited it, a mote of Fire and Air, was his only concession. He didn't have flint, or steel, except the blade girt on his hip. That was reserved for something greater.

There was no cold in the _ko'di._

The wind-plucked flames were a harp strung with steel, striking red notes. The fire he had laboured to build was strong enough to withstand the gusts, snapping back in protest like a sword coming to the parry. The tongues of fire were clean, the blaze deeply-rooted in the wood and ash. A pity to sully it. There was a time for shadow, too.

 _Father, forgive me,_ the dark man prayed. _Forgive what I have been. Help me become what I need to be._

Moridin fed newly-cut green wood into the flames, the sticks chopped neatly of a length with a knife of Air. They spat sap as the fire burrowed into them, blackening. Smoke twisted from the timber like seeping oil before breaking apart into choking billows.

Moridinn drew his long sword. He had played many parts during his long life. Aes Sedai, diplomat, advisor, general. King. Assassin. It was time to be a blade in the shadows once again.

Quickly, not wishing to untemper his Power-forged steel, he steeped the blade in the smoke, feeding it, inch by inch above the flames. The mirrored steel of the swordblade grew dull as greasy soot tainted the metal. No glint of light on steel would give Moridin away.

He was the knife in the dark.

It was time to go home.


	64. Chapter 64: Terrible Lizard

**Chapter 64: Terrible Lizard**

 _Raken_ reeled across the sky, sable outlines that cast no shadow. The squall of lightning had abated, and the darkness ebbed back in, gelid with fear.

The armoured Seanchan infantry columns were within bowshot of the Aiel defenders now, close enough for Ronam to hear their marching feet, the paean of praise they sung to their Emperor. In the defile behind the earthworks, a contingent of _Far Dareis Mai_ bent their bows to launch arrows in a high parabola over the defences to rain down upon the advancing men-at-arms. At this range, nearly every shaft found its mark, but the planished steel plate of the Seanchan was effective in deflecting the hail of bodkin points, scattering the falling arrows like women winnowing wheat from chaff. The occasional luckless man fell, but the arrows were no more than a nuisance to the infantry battles, which rolled on with a seemingly inevitable momentum.

Ronam grinned, raising his black _shoufa_ veil in anticipation. Took a last swig of life-giving water from his canteen, rolled his broad shoulders. Cracked his knuckles. It was time to break some heads.

The soft sound of falling earth, near-inaudible over the din of battle, the rhythmic clangour of marching feet was the only warning the Stone Dog got. He looked up, and met the gleaming, golden eyes of the apex predator staring down upon him.

The _torm_ breasted the hill of earth with deliberate, sidling menace. It moved with the lazy, limber grace of a mountain lion, but there was something lizard-like about the beast as well, with its wide-set powerful shoulders and low-to-the ground gait. Curved claws like bronze knives tipped each mighty limb, scattering earth and stones with a rattle as the massive weight of the beast caused subsidence of the earth rampart.

The _torm_ cocked its wedge-shaped head to regard the small, defiant figure with curiosity. Humans were prey. All except his handlers. Almandragal was hungry. His long, forked tongue flickered from his maw, tasting the air, expecting to savour the appetiser of his prey's terror before feasting upon its flesh.

To his surprise, there was no fear. Just the juniper sharpness of adrenaline and anger. His own hackles raised in response to the human's show of defiance, displaying the spines of his crest as he bared his teeth in a grim smile, leathery lips peeling back to expose a mouthful of ivory razors to strip and peel flesh from bone. The hiss of Almandragal's challenge rumbled from his cavernous chest, a sibilant expression of hunger and malice that turned men's blood to water.

Ronam was undaunted as he faced down the hulking menace, spear raised overarm ready to cast in his good right hand. "Ho, Ugliness!" he declared, as he planted his feet. "Come and taste my steel!" There was another spear gripped tight in his off-hand, a short-hafted man-killer topped with a long leaf-shaped blade for slashing and cutting. Ronam disdained a buckler against this monster.

The _torm_ 's serpentine tail lashed the ground as he brought his malicious spirit to bear, gathering himself ready to spring. Ronam refused to quail under its basilisk glare. With all the force of his brawny shoulder and arm behind it, he cast his spear, aiming for the copper-scaled breast of his towering foe as it reared up, hooded with menace like a roused cobra.

The spear's long blade caught the moon's light in a liquid refraction as it flashed through the air, and Ronam's aim was true. It struck flush upon the _torm_ 's exposed belly with the ringing peal of sword upon buckler. Yet the _torm_ 's bronze scales were proof against the Stone Dog's spear.

The _torm_ spoke then, a sibilant mockery of human speech. There was a cold delight in its voice. "Fllee, little man. Perhapss I will not purssue you."

Ronam used the brief respite to arm himself with a second spear, gripping one in each hand at their balance point. Their twin blades wove in a dexterous blur as the Aiel chief readied himself for the _torm_ 's onslaught.

His words were roots, anchoring him like an oak tree. "We do not run."

"Then you are fffood" the _torm_ declared with relish. "Almandragal will feasst upon your fllesh!"

The terrible lizard leapt. Its onset was irresistible, bearing Ronam down under its weight. The _torm'_ s disembowelling claws grated, scrabbling against his belly trying to find purchase upon the Aiel's steel armour. Its jaws closed hungry about the shoulder of his left arm with pulverising force, crumpling the steel of his pauldrons like cheap tin.

At the last instant, Ronam twisted aside from the _torm'_ s rapacious bite that sought to open his throat. He planted the butt of his right-hand spear against the ground, and the _torm'_ s own weight succeeded in doing what the strength of Ronam's arm could not, driving the leaf-shaped spear-point into the lizard's belly.

Black blood welled up around the puncture as a grunting Ronam by main strength sought to twist the spear-point deeper into his adversary's vitals.

Hot carrion breath blasted into the Taardad chieftain's face as the lizard worried at him. His shoulder was afire with pain, mangled. Were it not for the armour he wore, he would surely have lost the arm. _My thanks, Aan'allein, for the gift,_ Ronam thought. _I will stand you a skin of oosquai in this life, or when I wake from the dream._

The thought was a distraction. Evidence of his growing weakness. His skin was clammy, cold. Saturated with his own blood.

With a crack, the spear-shaft broke under the _torm's_ weight. He was unarmed. Somehow, he'd lost the spear that was in his left hand, and the full weight of the lizard's suffocating bulk fell upon him, pinning his uninjured right arm against the ground, rendering it useless.

Hissing triumph, the _torm_ yawned cavernously, releasing Ronam's mangled left shoulder, no doubt preparatory to tearing out his throat.

With his last reserves of strength, Ronam rammed his left arm down the _torm'_ s maw. It was an agony of effort, the shattered bones of his upper arm grating agonisingly. It was worth it, though, to grab the _torm's_ tongue at the root in his gauntleted fist.

Agonised, the lizard bit down upon his arm, gagging, unable to breathe, but the rerebrace upon Ronam's upper arm held against the pressure of the _torm'_ s bite. Desperate to escape, the lizard backpedalled, dragging Ronam with it across the ground, but the Aiel held a death-grip upon the _torm'_ s forked tongue as it thrashed, trying to dislodge him.

Exhausted by its efforts, the _torm_ eventually succumbed, suffocated. Fearing it was shamming, Ronam maintained his stranglehold as long as he could. _It was getting very dark_ , he thought, staring up into the sky as he lay upon his back. _Very dark, and very cold, too._ The pain was far off, now. Distant. That was bad and good.

His eyes closed. _It had been a good dream._

* * *

Marinna was terrified. Beyond terrified. She inhabited an ecstasy of horror which froze her limbs solid. She had fallen to her knees, defenceless. _Saidar_ might have lent her a backbone of resolve on other occasions. But the True Source had abandoned her some hours ago. The revulsion Marinna felt, viewing the naked horrors of battle had shattered the Void, a rude fist falling upon a mirror of glass.

Self-loathing vied with the fear. _You are no Aiel, Marinna._ The taunt she had suffered her whole life. Plump, homely Marinna was no warrior, not like her sister Shaiel.

Despite her potential, she had struggled to find a Wise One to take her as an apprentice. Not a single one in the whole Taardad clan wanted Marinna, a girl scared of her own shadow. Her pusillanimity was writ large in their discerning eyes. The kindest amongst them had suggested she might find a place amongst the Aes Sedai.

A part of Marinna had longed for that life. Snug amongst her books, she would make a fine Brown. Or maybe a sister of the Yellow Ajah. She was adept with the Healing weaves. Yet she could not leave her people. _Would_ not leave her family.

Somehow, she had found a Wise One willing to take her on. Sorilea. It was a surprising choice. The Chareen Wise One intimidated even other Wise Ones, not to mention clan chiefs. For some unknown reason, she had found a soft spot for Marinna. _Perhaps she thought I might make fine eating!_

Until today, she had thought of the decision to stay with her clan as a sacrifice of her own wants for the greater good. Now she knew the truth. It was fear. Fear of change. _You are despicable,_ Marinna upbraided herself, trying to use the goad of anger to urge her numbed limbs to respond. _Sorilea would dress me in black herself. Or stake me out for wild animals!_

Battle was overwhelming. The din of explosions crushed her to the earth. Screams and cries of injured and dying comrades chilled her blood. The naked, unadulterated hate in the war-cries of the Seanchan made her want to press her hands over her ears and shut her eyes. To claw a hole in the ground with her fingernails and cower in it, like a gopher in its burrow.

Everyone knew fear in the dance of spears. Rhuarc himself had told her that. But it was her tender-heartedness that had unmanned her, as she witnessed the cruelty of war, men and women marring the Creator's image, over and over again.

Her mother had said something. _You have your father's heart. Even more so than your sister and brothers._ Marinna didn't understand why Aviendha had said that. It passed comprehension. Her father was the _Car'a'carn._ A man who carried a sword. An arbiter of ultimate, retributive violence.

Marinna didn't understand. But the words lent her strength. Moved her focus outwards from herself, somehow. The crimson violence she saw still appalled her, affrighted her, but now she felt a desperate kinship with those who suffered. Something atavistic which wasn't quite courage. A deeper fear than that she bore for herself. She would do anything to stand between her people and those who would do them harm. _Anything_.

Fifty paces in front of her, one of the _Far Dareis Mai_ fell, jerked from her feet like a marionette with her strings cut. The victim of one of those muskets. Marinna didn't have the Power, but she _did_ know the use of herbs and the treatment of wounds. She could help the brave young Maiden.

She would have to be careful, though. There were Seanchan musketeers at the drystone wall beyond, bracing their long-barrelled weapons on the stones, coolly taking aim at the Maidens and anyone who sought to aid them.

Trying to remember the trailcraft her brothers had taught her, she began to crawl on her belly towards the stricken young woman, using dead bodies and dead-ground for cover. _Light, so many bodies._

A musket ball spat into the ground a pace from her head, and Marinna froze. Then her nerve broke, and she scrambled the rest of the way towards her patient as fast as she could before she lost her courage altogether.

Another Maiden gave her an encouraging grin as she scrambled to the side of her fallen comrade. Light, these women were _crazy._

"Can you help our spear-sister, Wise One?" the red-headed woman asked. A mere slip of a girl, her pale cheeks freckled, long hair held back by a leather cord reminiscent of a Malkieri _hadori._ But something in her bearing, some unspoken assurance, told Marinna she was in command.

"No promises." Marinna told her, shortly. She did not want to occasion false hope. The fallen Maiden – another who was little more than a girl in truth – lay still, pallid. She wasn't breathing. Marinna took her pulse. Nothing.

The dead woman's comrade gave Marinna a look that contained a mixture of resignation and desperate hope. The Wise One shook her head in negation. "I'm sorry. She's gone."

"We all wake," the Maiden told her, not without sympathy, in the same breath stringing an arrow and letting fly. A grunt of satisfaction informed Marinna that the Maiden had found her mark. "We'll all wake soon, I think." The Maiden indicated the desperate battle at the drystone walls, where the Seanchan column had carried over the ditch and by the sheer mass of its onset had driven the Stone Dog defenders from the drystone walls.

The battle raged in the dead ground behind the barricade now, a hammerhead of Seanchan men-at-arms mobbed by Aiel spears. The warriors of the Raven Empire had paid a heavy price for every step they took in blood. But for every Seanchan warrior the Aiel cut down, another two took their place. "We're nearly out of arrows," the _Far Dareis Mai_ told Marinna phlegmatically. "Then it'll be spears and knives in the night."

"Aren't you afraid?" Marinna asked, before she could stop herself, looking at the slight _cadin'sor_ clad figure the other woman made. What courage could so possess a woman that she would venture her unarmoured body against the imposing steel-clad paladins yonder?

"Heh. Of what?" the Maiden asked with genuine amusement, an infectious self-confidence. "Those lobsters can't lay steel upon me, I wager. A good wager too, if I can find someone to take it. If I wake from the dream, I won't have to pay the forfeit!"

The young woman strung her last arrow. Fired it. "My thanks for your aid, Wise One" she added, before turning to her spear-sisters, all of whom were brandishing spears and yelling, working themselves into a killing frenzy.

" _Wash the spears – while the sun climbs high,_

 _Wash the spears – while the sun falls low,_

 _Wash the spears – who fears to die?_

 _Wash the spears – no one I know!"_

With great sadness, Marinna saw Ronam's body, lying under the bulk of one of those dreadful copper-scaled fighting lizards, not far from where she stood. She had witnessed the onset of the _torm_ – that had been the moment of the battle when she had wet herself in fear.

The Wise One began a quick prayer for the soul of Ronam. A kind man. _Gentle with the lowly. Rough with the strong._ Then her eyes widened. She discerned the faint movement of the chief's chest, rising and falling. Somehow, Ronam had survived. She could help him.

 _Wash the spears – till shade is gone_

 _Wash the spears – till water turns dry_

 _Wash the spears – How long from home?_

 _Wash the spears – Until I die!_

A white-clad figure fell in beside her. An elderly _gai'shain_ , but tough and capable-looking, with salt-and-pepper hair. _Gai'shain_ were forbidden from fighting, but would often give aid to others on the battlefield, if the need was great.

Trying to invest her voice with the assured authority of a Wise One, she addressed him. " _Gai'shain,_ come with me" Marinna ordered. "You can help me tend to the injured."

If he discerned her abject appearance, the smell of her fear and urine-soaked clothes, the respectful tenor of his voice belied it as he promptly acquiesced to her authority. "Of course, Wise One" he replied – in a _Shaido_ accent, if she did not mistake her guess! – his voice imbued with an imperturbable humility which did wonders in assuaging her own palpitating heart.


	65. Chapter 65: Night's Shade

**Chapter 65: Night's Shade**

The shadows danced.

Moridin slipped through them. His feet ran light and brisk up the long stone steps. Not a swordmaster's gliding of-a-sudden rush. He drifted like the reek of smoke from a tallow candle, a natural, flowing motion designed to assuage the eye, letting him slide past would-be observers unnoticed. Yet the dark man was in haste, his breath prickling fire in his lungs.

Night's Shade cauled his form. It augmented his talents. Sharpened his senses. Moridin had no need of vulgar rings like the Bloodknife _ter'angreal_ to whet his steel for the fray. The man who never slept had forgotten nothing. That was his blessing. _His curse._

The weave would steal his life, even as it enhanced it. Life in death. Death in life. Another ouroboros. He could feel the thread of it, spooling through his fingers, attenuated to how much he drew upon himself. Unlike the crude facility of the Bloodknife ring, he could allot his resources as he wished. If he so chose, he could measure his span in seconds. Strike faster than the eye could track.

It would be a relief, the moment the thread ran out. The Malkieri thegn had the right of it. _Your days have been too long upon the earth, Moridin._

The corridor, running the circumference of the White Tower, was the quickest way to ascend, short of Travelling. The bole of Tar Valon's fortress was the trunk of a great tree. The seven Ajah – equal in dignity – divided it into wedges, like a pie.

The Tower – ascending in haste from a coterie of abutting halls many hundreds of feet below – was no slender spire, like the Tower of Ghenjeh. It was squat and massive. An ivory tusk of Ogier-wrought, Power-tempered stone rising above the river island. A fane to _saidar,_ staring unblinking in challenge at the horizon where Dragonmount testified to what a man might do.

To Moridin, who had been here but seldom, the building evoked a disquieting feeling of familiarity. The White Tower bore a passing similarity to the long-overthrown Hall of the Servants in Paaran Disen. An aesthetic. Yet it was a place that begrudged a man. Especially one such as him – _Tsorov'ande Doon –_ who could call the storm, and set it to dance among his foes. _That_ ,too, was written into the fabric, into the stone and mortar.

 _A black-souled tempest_. Once he had owned that label with pride. Now, he was above the trappings of hubris. Stripped bare of ambition.

Now, he was merely Death.

Currently, he traversed a segment of the Tower inhabited by the Green Ajah. _The Battle Ajah._ A fact attested to by the tapestry draping the left-hand wall, depicting green-garbed Aes Sedai dealing death and disfigurement upon Trollocs, Dreadlords and Myrddraal. A cautery of Fire and lightning. It quickened the heart. Set it racing in his breast.

Death incarnate.

He felt _her_ disapproving gaze upon him, written small in the women who yet walked these halls. Latra Posae Decumae. _Shadar Nor._

Reflexively, Moridin tightened his grip upon his swordhilt, sword held out in front of him, grip reversed and blade angling downward. His smile, too, was taut and grim. A worthy adversary.

The cabal of women had triumphed over the men in all of the realities, with only Rand's mirror attaining some measure of parity. Moridin wished them joy of it. After he had accomplished his designs here, that triumph – among many things – would be of no moment.

 _I am coming for you._

Moridin did not hold the Power. Not yet. _Saidin_ enticed him, as the Sickness bleeding through it repelled him. A sweet pool of honey, crawling with bloated, drowning wasps.

He did not dare draw upon it. Semirhage and Mesaana – amongst others – remembered much, too. There would be inverted weaves, gossamer threads to ensnare the unwary man unwise enough to hold _saidin_ ,here. He did not need to see them. Some atavistic survivor instinct made the hairs upon his neck burr with tension.

Living was a habit. A man's mind turned towards the grave, even as his body clung to life.

The death Moridin felt in him was transmuted to others, instead. He had left two Tower Guard in their proud winged helmets, one White Ajah Aes Sedai in his wake. And a novice. The deaths all attested to failures in his tradecraft, but even he could not hope to pass through hundreds of Aes Sedai, Warders and the Dark One knew who else without detection, even in the dead of night.

The death of a eleven-year old novice – a pale wisp of a girl with her hair in stringlike braids – would once have been mandated by Moridin's deathlust, even as it scarified his soul with a keen knife.

This time, it had been a necessity. To his Night's Shade-sharpened senses, the flicker in her eye as she tracked the whisper of movement was transparent. He'd driven his folded knuckles into the hollow of her neck ere she could give cry, heard the crack as the hard blow fractured the hyoid bone. Death was instantaneous. The anguish was there, whetted even sharper. With it was a mounting anger. Clean and white and sharp.

He'd seen what his victim was about, her senses alert as she played a grim parody of a Novice prank upon a cruel Accepted. No itch-leaf in this Accepted's shift, no bucket of ice-cold water braced above the door. The child, all grovelling supplication, had delivered tea laced with heartsbane to her superior.

The Accepted's demise had been swift, but not kind. Moridin had watched the novice stand over the body, allowing herself the satisfaction of a cold little smile playing briefly across her wan face. A mousetrap smile, a thing of steel wire and tension.

Another reminder. There was nothing left in this world worth saving. No person worth redeeming. Not even the illusion of distinct identities, when all was said and done.

Every soul stripped down to a bedrock of self-interest and congruent cruelty, freed of the sting of conscience, the lash of remorse. Little broken clockwork toys, wound up and set to run, all thinking they enjoyed the autonomy of selfdom, when in fact, they were shards of the Dark One's selfish, hungry heart.

These little ones were the worst. They had been born into it, without even the salving habituation of the better nature of their past life before _Tarmon Gai'don_ to slow their degradation. Killing them was a _mercy._ They were too broken to even know what they lacked. What they had lost.

All save him.

The shame, the guilt, the anguish he carried was a grace. It might save him, yet.

Moridin did not have long, now. His minions might still not register the threat that stole amongst them, but the Dark One felt every nuance, every step he took a discordant jangle of harpsichord strings.

Right now, _Caisen Hob,_ cruel and curious, let him run unfettered, intrigued as to what he intended to do. The dark man could feel the cobweb-brush of the darkness caressing him, trying to divine his purpose. Balked by the sword of steel he carried, blade lamp-blackened.

A simple tool, perhaps. And yet, Moridin intuited that in his hands, it was a weighty thing he bore. The equal, perhaps, of Callandor, though it was no angreal. Not even a _ter'angreal._

Just a sword. And for all that, something more.

A sword and a man to wield it.

Moridin could sense Lighteater's frustration. Sensed that he was a glamour in the Adversary's eye. A shadow, dancing at the periphery of vision. His intent and the things he bore – the sword and the Ring of Tamyrlin – concealed. Soon, soon, the Dark One's fear would overcome his curiosity, and Moridin would be rendered, grist to the mill, ripped and torn upon the gears and wheels of this hard world, where everything was subject to _Him._

But first, in the time that remained him, Moridin intended to do some real damage.

He was nigh, and time was short. Moridin drew upon himself as he rounded the curve of wall adjacent to the Amyrlin's apartments. He darkened, faded. Quickened. He expected Warders. Perhaps Aes Sedai. Nothing. A shut door. An empty corridor.

 _A trap_. Time to spring it.

The shadows were silk and streith, the glove upon a fist of steel, disgorging Myrddraal by the score. A horror of pallid, eyeless faces, the graveyard stench of necrotic flesh. Clutching hands, with nails that would strip the skin from a man's face, as they converged upon him. Black Thakan'dar blades seeking their home in his flesh.

His scream a paean of unchained fury, Moridin tore into the heart of them. His adversaries seemed to be drifting towards him as though swimming through water.

Exalted by Night's Shade, the blademaster barely needed the forms, or even the Oneness. He leapt high, balletic, sword trailing from his outstretched arm, deflecting a half-dozen lancing blows, as he spun. Thistledown Floats on the Whirlwind reaped a dozen heads.

This time, the Fades that fell did not lash out in abandon with tainted blades. _Justice_ suffered no redress. What Moridin cut, he killed, and there was no stay in execution.

Sheer weight of bodies piling in upon him pressed him down as he lopped off arms and legs, truncating swordarms at the wrist. Moridin exploded upwards, outwards, a surge of speed and irresistible power, using Lizard in the Thornbush. It was artless abandon, a fox rampaging through a henhouse, a bloodless slaughter as the damascened steel carved bloodless gashes in corpse flesh.

An alarm – an ululating blare of Air. Finally, Moridin had tripped one of Semirhage's weaves. The Tower would be roused against him. _Let them come!_

The last of the Myrddraal fell, but the dark was far from empty. Hungry forms, avid of eye, prognathous of jaw, slinking towards Moridin. _Darkhounds._ Maybe an entire pack. Their teeth and claws were not the only danger. Their blood and saliva carried a pestilential, agonizing death, even for one such as he. _I must be faster._

Moridin could smell their fear. But their hate was greater. _Find the leader._

The alpha edged forward, massive haunches bunched. Ready to spring. The Darkhound's eyes watched the sword, dragging lazy behind the swordsman as if the yard-long blade was too heavy to carry. Saw its death mirrored in the mesmerising blade. It was undeterred.

Those malign eyes locked onto the puny human swordsman. It would leap, and the white steel would rip open its belly, and it would die, entrails strewn upon the floor to be squabbled over by its pack-mates. But while its heart still beat, it would clamp those hideous jaws about its enemy, and worry the life from him in screaming, mewling torment.

It gave no tongue as it came for him, an uncoiling, sinuous strike, leading with that wedge-shaped head, an anvil proof against any sword blow. As silent and deadly as a shark, arrowing in towards a wounded prey.

At the last second, Moridin spun laterally away from the leaping raver, the huge frame of the alpha barring half the ravening pack from following their leader as it barrelled past. He slammed the heavy sword vertically downwards, a matador lancing a spear into a bewildered bull.

His stroke was surgically precise, severing the Darkhound's spinal column at the nape of its brindled neck. There was very little blood as he leapt skywards, pushing off from the alpha's broad back as he withdrew his sword. Even to his augmented senses, he sensed a half-dozen more bodies launching themselves towards him. Missiles angling inwards towards him. The irresistible momentum of so many huge bodies impossible to check. Nowhere to go.

Except up.

With a wrench, Moridin exerted his energies, drawing deeper upon his body's reserves, using Night's Shade. The air beneath his feet was liquid now, viscous. Turning to stone beneath the soles of his boots. With a galvanic effort, he scrambled up that treacherous staircase.

At the top of his flight, all his kinetic energy spent, he saw the carnage unfold beneath him as the Darkhound pack caromed into each other mid-air. Ribs cracked and necks snapped, as they fell into a tangled, snarling heap of confusion, snapping at each other in frustration.

Then he was amongst them, dealing death. Blood sprayed as his sword lanced, and he danced his graceful gyre. Almost prescient, he avoided the effusion of blood, the hungry maws and slashing paws with equanimity.

As the last Darkhound fell, choking out its obscene life, he slowed the cadence of Night's Shade to his body's normal pace. Moridin guessed he had ten minutes left of his lifespan, though his body yet responded with the scintillating vigour of honed youth.

The door between him and his quarry was bleak white. It had once been wood. Now it was _cuendillar._ Moridin grimaced, mirthlessly. The door might be proof against anything except the True Power. No doubt it was warded, too.

The time for subterfuge was past.

The door – frame and all, together with a greater portion of the surrounding masonry – was blasted inwards. The _door_ might be heartstone. The wall wasn't. It collapsed inwards in a splinter of stone chips and choking dust, which Moridin slapped down cursorily with a blanket of Air.

Moridin expended his own strength precisely, using just sufficient force to breach the chamber and no more. It was not part of his desire to kill the one who dwelt within.

At least, not yet.

He took in the room – opulent, a double-bed hung with streith – with an assassin's pragmatic eye. Flows of Fire and Air, filaments that burned and burrowed, started from his hands, pouring onto the floor ahead of him, flowing outwards into the room in a rippling wave, singeing the opulent rugs underfoot indiscriminately as they did their work, directed by his intelligence.

 _Fire Ants._ These would trip the deadly wards, without harming him in the process. At least, if their radius of effect was sufficiently localised. A reasonable assumption, in this instance.

Moridin felt, rather than saw, his weave fail, running into a wall of impenetrable cold, as the darkness ahead resolved into a single, elemental shadow. Dark and deadly as the ebony _ter'angreal_ that produced Balefire. As poised as a roused blacklance. It bore the form of a woman, arrogant in her sleek nakedness. Eyes as winter-slick as black ice met his. Moridin felt his flesh crawl.

 _Semirhage._

 _Saidin_ guttered at her very approach, like a candle in a draught of wind. Nothing he could see. Not a weave, either. It was the unlight of her, the penumbra of shadow cast by her _ara'i._ Moridin shuddered. _Impossible. Nobody can be that strong in the Power._ Then he saw what she caressed in her hand, and understood.

The access-key for the female half of the Choedan Kal.

Her smile was the whisper of a blade leaving its sheath.

"Moridin" she thrilled. "Welcome to my dominion."


	66. Chapter 66: Dragon-Blooded

**Chapter 66: Dragon-Blooded**

Toval Han's voice was precise. Proper as polished epaulettes, filled with sang-froid. Collected.

"Front rank, present arms!"

He intended to show his Banner-General what motivated Tarabon men could do. It had been long since he and his company had jettisoned the hated white chevron that designated their inferior, auxiliary status. It still rankled, remembering how he'd thrilled at the distinction of the singular uniform, before he learned its meaning.

He was a proud man. Proud to serve the Empire. Proud of the way his well-drilled musketeers formed the triple line. The first rank kneeling, muskets at their shoulders. The second standing behind, muskets levelled. The rear rank methodically reloading. Rain wicked off his waxed broad-brimmed hat. It was grimy work in the dark.

"Keep your powder dry, buckos" he admonished them.

They had enfiladed right, flanking the Aiel savages who continued their fanatical assault on the battering-ram of Khoweali heavy infantry with commendable savagery. His swift-moving troops were positioned to rake the black veiled men and women.

It did not sit well with Toval to make war on women, but if these barbarians had stooped so low as to conscript their womenfolk to battle, he would oblige them with a soldier's death. As clean as he could make it. "Aim low" he directed in a low, urgent voice. "And don't flaming miss. Or yon pretty black-eyed Maidens will have our hides."

He took a deep breath, filling his lungs.

"Front rank! FIRE!"

About seventy muskets fired as one. A flat, hard report. Dirty off-white smoke coiled, choking. Yes, it was sodden work, the rain ruining the powder of some of his men. About fifty Aiel bodies fell. They were close to breaking now. He could feel it.

His front-rankers were already priming their weapons, making ready for a second volley, if one was needed.

"Second rank! Make ready! FIRE!"

Another killing volley. The musket balls slew indiscriminately at this close proximity, irrespective if a figure wore steel plate or _cadin'sor._ The second-rank now knelt, beginning to load their weapons, as the front rank rammed musket balls, clearing the line of sight for his third rank to fire.

The Aiel finally broke, streaming backwards as a body, not routed, simply looking for somewhere to make a last stand. It was a marvel they had stood as long as they had against both overwhelming odds and the terrifying, shattering volley fire they had no answer for.

All except one lone _cadin'sor_ figure, advancing towards them. He was as grimy as a chimney-sweep, but a fine figure of a fighting man all the same, tall and braw through the shoulders, crowned with the flaming red hair so many of these Aiel had. Hair like the Dragon Reborn himself.

The man's hands were empty. No weapons. Yet some sixth sense raised the hairs upon Toval Han's neck. There was no fear in the Aiel's impassive eyes over his raised _shoufa_ veil. Toval had been a Seanchan soldier for two years, and a mercenary for ten before that, and he knew that look. A man readying himself to do murder.

Toval Han found his gaze drawn to the man, responding to some powerful magnetism.

Watched as the lashing rain squalled, striking an invisible _something_ , spattering off that convex surface in streams without touching the Aiel warrior who stood still, planting his feet in a fighting-stance.

Then he knew what this man was.

He was their death.

* * *

 _Saidin_ was numinous. A brooding red giant, filling the Void with heat and light. There was no place in the Oneness for hate. The Power was all.

Janduin looked upon the Seanchan musketeers and felt nothing for them. Most of them were not even aware of him as he stalked towards them, filled with the molten magma of retribution. Inside that furnace heart, Janduin was cold.

Their war-leader turned towards him, a haughty-faced man with a waxed moustache. With _saidin_ accentuating his senses, Janduin could see every hair follicle of the Lieutenant's ridiculous affectation. As irrelevant as the man himself, and his company.

They were dead from the moment the Dragon-Blooded had laid his eye upon them. From the moment that they had cut down Maidens and _Sha'een M'taal_ with their coward's weapons from ambush.

The Lieutenant recognised his death approaching. It was in his eyes. This one, at least, was a brave man. His vainglory set aside, the Seanchan warrior faced eternity with his spine ramrod-straight, arms clasped behind his back, an ironic smile playing upon his lips.

The wrath banked in Janduin's heart coruscated through his limbs, filling his hands. He trembled at the immensity of it. The space between his palms began to glow, the air ionizing around a thunderhead of Earth and Fire, glowing an urgent cherry-red like iron in the forge.

The Stone Dog let the weave choose its form, a familiar one. A spear, forged from the elemental Power itself, held in his good right hand. He drew the Power through it, a thick conduit of Earth and Fire that envenomed the lance, which drank in all that raw stuff of Death and Life, its colour falling through the visible spectrum into the infrared even as it grew weighty in Janduin's hand. A red dwarf star, collapsing in on itself.

 _I kill with my heart._

With a cry of anguish and release, Janduin drove the point of the dolorous spear into the ground.

The ground broke open under that violating impact, a chasm that _ripped_ and _tore_ , a maw that swallowed up Toval Han and his musketeers into its depths, a vortex that churned hungry with a gravity that sought to pull the fabric of the ground itself into its heart.

Teeth bared, snarling with effort, Janduin dragged the lance through the ground, finding resistance as a team of oxen might in pulling a plough-blade though heavy clay soil, as he levelled its destructive appetite upon the armoured crimson millipede of Seanchan heavy infantry.

Where the plough-blade of the speartip was directed, it was accompanied by the grisly sounds of the grave consuming living men within their cerements of lacquered armour, crushing and compacting. Within a few heartbeats, the Seanchan men-at-arms were no more.

With a pang of regret, Janduin released the Spear, but not the glory of _saidin._ He was breathing hard. Sheened in sweat. Winded, as if he had run a dozen miles and fought a battle at the end of it.

Some few Seanchan survivors lived to flee his wrath. Numb now, shaken to his core, he let them go. His fellow Aiel – men he had known his whole life, brothers of his Society – looked at him with trepidation in their gaze. Not quite able to meet his eyes. This was the moment Janduin had fled from. Had dreaded his whole life. The moment when he became _other._

Emptiness swallowed his heart. His hands were shaking. His mouth dry.

 _Father, this is what it was like for you? This isolation. How could you bear it?_

He turned away, unable to bear their gaze. _Toh. Toh_ like a mountain upon his back, slumping his shoulders.

Then he heard something strange. The flat hard sound of spear hafts thwacked against steel bucklers. The same rhythm for the dance of spears. At first, there were no words. Then a husky male voice matched each exclamation, and others took up the refrain, one by one. Men and Maidens alike.

 _Elder Brother._

Janduin grinned from ear to ear, turning his face upwards gratefully to bask in the Creator's merciful rain. He could feel the millstone weight lift from his full heart. This was a weight too, but one a man could hope to bear. A burden no true man would ever seek to put down.

 _Water and shade._ What Aiel could ask for more?


	67. Chapter 67: Counting the Uncountable

**Chapter 67: Counting the Uncountable**

"Moridin"

Semirhage spoke, huskily, caressing his name like a lover. Hungrily. "I have a plot in my garden picked out just for you."

The Power coursed through her. She was a raker, carried upon the Father of Storms, the fragile shell of her body a hull, a husk. Power beyond comprehension, demanding to be used. The frozen ordure of corrupted _saidar._ She misliked using it, even with the Great Lord's protection from the madness. Yet Moridin was _deadly_. She had no choice. The Choedan Kal would not allow her to draw the Dark One's essence.

Moridin raised his left hand, palm facing her. A gesture for her to stop. Of supplication? She didn't understand. Of all people, Moridin should know her better. There was no fear on his face. No anger. Only ... serenity. A wintry civility.

Then she saw. A ring upon his finger, like a wedding band, a Moebius strip of polished black jet. The Ring of Dominion.

Her chest felt caught in bands of iron. _It could not be._

"No.." she breathed, shaking her head in denial.

Semirhage felt the Power rip away from her in a torment of loss, a toy torn from a child's hand. The hand of Moridin's will clutching at her heart. Yet even then, she sought to fight. To hold to the Oneness, even as she watched Moridin use the very _saidar_ she drew to cocoon her, binding her fast.

Semirhage straightened her spine. "So, kill me then, Moridin, and have done." she dared him.

Moridin shook his head. "No." he uttered.

 _She doesn't understand_ , Moridin realised. Not even as she watched him begin a complex weave using the very _saidar_ she drew through the _ter'angreal._ Not even whilst she felt him rifling through her _mind_ , accessing the knowhow to achieve his design using unfamiliar _saidar._ Yet she was still defiant.

"You mean to torture me?" she scorned him, sneering. "Surely you know there is nothing I cannot bear. Nothing I would not willingly undergo myself to further my understanding. You cannot break me."

"No."

Understanding came to Semirhage fully-fledged.

Desperately, she reached for the True Power, a trickle compared to the deluge of _saidar_ that Moridin was already drawing through her. The _saa_ sleeted across her eyes, faster and faster, until it made a white bar dividing the iris of her eyes. And she struck.

Not a shield. It was beyond her compass to sever the connection to the female half of the One Power, and would take far too long to shield Moridin from _saidin._

The bar of Balefire lanced from her. It met ... something .. coming the other way, the flows cancelling each other out, precipitating a storm of white crystal that the violence of the interaction scattered in a flurry.

Then Semirhage felt everything .. stop.

Except her mind.

She looked out into the blizzard of crystal between her and Moridin with perfect understanding. Moridin's glacial eyes, a study in concentration. A perfect still-frame. Absolutely silent, of course, the alarm-siren ward finally stilled with a heavy hand. How could there be sound, when no time passed?

It was good that the scene was so vivid, so lucidly detailed, Semirhage realized with frozen clarity. Because this – and her memories – were all she would have to sustain her.

Forever.

* * *

Moridin stared at Semirhage, a beautiful ebony statue, her lips skinned back in a defiant snarl, teeth bared. The dark woman had been right. She was a serpent, immune to her own poison. There was no punishment appropriate for Semirhage's transgressions. So he had given her a gift, instead. A fate he had once, in his madness, intended for a friend.

Time for reflection.

Preservation incorruptible.

Ilyena Sunhair had been right, too. _It would be a living death._

Unblinking consciousness. Pinioned between the syllables of being. Imprisoned within a single heartbeat of the Wheel. Whether a second, or an Age passed in the outside world, Semirhage would experience Eternity. It was nothing the human mind was equipped to handle.

 _Counting the Uncountable._

Take the natural numbers. _Aleph null._ An infinity. Yet you had the comfort of cardinality. A person could count them, one after another. There was a structure the finite mind could compass. Even that would eventually break a mind. That was what Moridin had experienced, as he watched the Ages pass with agonizing slowness in his prison.

Then there were the real numbers. Not just the rational ones. That was infinity, too. But a cat of a very different coat. _Aleph one._ You could write an injection of the counting numbers, or the rational numbers into it, but between any two countable numbers – no matter how close – lay another skein of infinity.

Yet you would try to count, regardless, simply because you marked the passage of time, even if no time passed. You might dress up the cardinality as you chose, expressing it as poring over the stuff contained inside your mind – recalling your memories, playing through an old song.

But a person, no matter how old, was a book with only a finite number of pages. Even reading the book infinitely many times would only be a _countable_ infinity. There were only so many pages, so many words, so many letters to reorder.

Even if he killed her now, it would still be too late.

Perhaps it would not be so bad. Insanity was a comfort. One Moridin understood all too well.

 _Had you then told me, that sweet summer night,_

 _We walked in the garden, beneath the moonlight._

 _How lovely you are, and I want you so,_

 _Would you have listened? Now I'll never know._

Moridin gave Semirhage a last look. He had shared this woman's bed, once, back in another world. They had danced in the gardens of Paaran Disen, back before she had sloughed off the skin of her humanity.

The world moved on.

 _Now the long day is ending, the shadows are falling,_

 _The meadowlarks calling for me to come nigh._

 _And the evening is nearing, the daylight is dying,_

 _A soft breeze is sighing, a mournful cry._


	68. Chapter 68: Her Father's Daughter

**Chapter 68: Her Father's Daughter**

It proved an exhausting struggle for Marinna and the Shaido _gai'shain_ to pry the dead weight of the slain _torm_ from Ronam. The creature's body was heavy with dense musculature, weighing several hundredweight. The pair of them wrestled manfully with the heavy corpse, a silent endeavour punctuated by laboured breathing.

The bronze-armoured reptile was a fearsome sight, even in death and Marinna shuddered at the unblinking appraisal of its honey-gold eye. Sightless now, its lens bespeckled with mud like a wren's egg.

Marinna's impromptu battlefield triage passed over the warrior's mangled shoulder, the crumpled steel plate of his armour driven into his flesh by the _torm'_ s frenzied bite. Blood, black and viscous in the dark, welled up from his gouged flesh. He likely had a broken clavicle too, judging by his posture. These wounds needed to be cleaned and treated, but in themselves, they ought not prove immediately life-threatening.

The young Wise One misliked how still the Taardad chieftain lay. Placing her cheek close to his mouth, she could just about feel the warmth of Ronam's breath. There was life in him yet, fading fast. His body imbued with a warrior's animus, relinquishing its tenure, his battle fought, his foe slain.

"Oh no, you don't!" Marinna scolded him. "I'm not going to be the one that tells your sister-wives I could not save you. Hear me?"

It was her own self-loathing turned outwards, Marinna recognised, shamefaced, as she upbraided a true man of courage. The recognisance did not lessen the anger, rooted in fear. A good thing, too.

The anger – and Ronam's need – kept her mind from the chaotic battle that eddied around them, not a score of paces from where she knelt beside Ronam's body. A vicious hand-to-hand engagement, contested between a banner of heavily-armoured Seanchan infantry, armed with a fell assemblage of polearms – weapons suited for both stabbing and administering clubbing and crushing blows – and a heavily-outnumbered but tenacious war-party of Stone Dogs in steel plate armour.

The spear-armed Aiel tore into the seasoned Seanchan infantry with savage relish, a clash illuminated by the brisk silver striation of lightning flashes and the concussive amber conflagration of exploding Dragon's Eggs, rendering the steel-clad figures heroic, quicksilver dancers lithe between charcoal-etched Seanchan shades, demonic figures in their horn-headed helms.

The men that fell, marred, bleeding and dying to be heedlessly trampled underfoot in the melee by friend or foe alike, accused those who yet danced by their silence and blood. The vainglory of the victor came at too high a price, a damning ledger of maimed humanity.

If Ronam heard Marinna, he gave no sign of it. The flesh of his wrist was clammy, pallid under his tan in contrast to the crimson blood he had so liberally spent. His pulse was weak under her thumb, a stumbling drum-roll, light and fast.

 _Too fast._ Marinna searched her purse, finding the herbs she sought by feel in the dark. The gossamer-wing texture of the dried flowers were subtle under her educated fingers. _Foxgloves._ She crumbled one of the hooded pink flowers upon his tongue. The digitalis should steady his fluctuating heartbeat, making it slower and more regular.

Ronam's prone form gave the lie to her desperate efforts to save his life. "You need to fight, Ronam!" Marinna scolded him. "I thought you Stone Dogs were supposed to be tough!"

To the Wise One's surprise, the Shaido _gai'shain_ crouched down beside the Stone Dog, lending his voice to hers as she began the delicate task of removing pieces of broken armour from Ronam's wounds.

Focusing upon her own task, at first she did not hear the words that Muradin uttered in low, urgent tones. A familiar song, a familiar rhythm that sped her work, lent purpose and enervated numb, trembling fingers:

" _Wash the spears – while I breathe!_

 _Wash the spears – my steel is bright!"_

Ronam's lips moved, shaping the words. The man was insensible, but the words of 'Wash the Spears' were a tether, a raw-hide thong holding him to the world of flesh.

With a gentleness that surprised Marinna, the Shaido warrior clasped Ronam's uninjured hand in a warrior's grip, his weathered face graven with concern. Marinna gently opened the chief's eyes, observing his dilated pupils, signifying the digitalis was beginning to have its desired effect.

To her annoyance, the Wise One became aware of an insistent tugging upon her arm. Exasperated, she rounded upon Muradin. "Wise One, we need to leave. Now!" he hissed, urgently.

A single glance proved sufficient to identify what had alarmed the _gai'shain_ so. Marinna's blood ran cold in her veins as she watched the quartet of women picking their way almost diffidently amongst the fallen bodies.

Two _damane_ – faces ascetic and solemn, all sorrowful purpose – and two cold-eyed _sul'dam_ , huntresses holding the leashes of their charges. Leashed Ones and Leash Holders made a study in contrasts, the _sul'dam_ refined in high-collared steel-grey silks, the _damane_ martial in their empanelled, stylized lightning-mark coats.

There was resignation in Muradin's eyes, and a terrible compassion. "Run!" he urged her. "You have not seen what these _da'tsang_ are capable of. You cannot hope to stand against them. Save yourself."

Marinna's gorge rose. With an effort of will, she rose to her feet. Smoothed her skirts, planted her feet.

"And what will become of Ronam son of Rhuarc then?" she replied, in an unsteady voice. "No. A Wise One of the Taardad Aiel does not abandon her charge. I did not heal him only to see him die of his wounds, _gai'shain._ Muradin son of Muradin, bear him to safety. I will cover your back as you withdraw."

There was a new appraisal in the Shaido's eyes. Approval. "Yes, Wise One!" he replied. There was something wild, something dangerous in his voice that communicated itself to her. A martial urgency that belied a _gai'shain_ 's expected meekness. "I wish you joy in the dance."

As the _damane_ walked her down, the Power awoke in the Void, a wellspring of promise.

 _Yes!_ Marinna acknowledged as she drew the skeins of _saidar_ about her. The Shaido was right. There was joy in this. An intoxication that made her bold, that made her hand heavy in might as she armoured herself in the One Power. Protecting those who could not protect themselves.

Marinna understood, now.

 _I am my father's daughter._

There was trepidation in the eyes of the _damane_ now. "Be ware, Mistress," one warned. "She stands ready."

The _sul'dam_ she addressed ignored the words of her Leashed One, fixing Marinna with an aquiline gaze as she stalked forward, all but dragging the _damane_ with her.

In her hand was a silver leash that she extended towards the Wise One. Her voice was cool silk shirring over steel. "Come quietly, _marath'damane,_ " she coaxed Marinna, taking in the Aiel woman's soiled garb and tear-stained face. "Make an end to fear. The leash is light and easy to bear. It is clear you are no warrior."

They were a cautious five feet apart, the _sul'dam_ and she, the Seanchan woman holding out the yoke of bondage towards her. Slowly, Marinna raised her head. Her eyes blazed.

"You shall not have me" the Wise One declared, her voice ringing with authority.

The lead _sul'dam_ met her defiant gaze with the confidence of a seasoned campaigner. "Then you shall die, Aiel."

An invisible blade of Spirit sought to sunder _saidar_ from Marinna, even as the _sul'dam_ strode boldly forward, ready to slip the collar around her neck. The Wise One met the _damane's_ flows with the tempered steel of her own shield, as she belatedly realised the direct threat presented by the Leash Holder and her _a'dam._

The Power was a keen knife in Marinna's hand, a razor of Air severing the _sul'dam's_ hand at the wrist. Collar and leash spilled to the ground, spurned hacksilver.

The _sul'dam_ recoiled in silent anguish, the _damane_ mirroring her mistress's torment, the Power lost to them in their shock even as the second pair assailed Marinna, a flurry of Deathgates fanning from the second _damane_ 's pinwheeling fingers, small Gateways each about the size of a playing-card.

Hardly knowing what she did, Marinna scattered them with a gust of Air and Water. One of the Deathgates tore through the exposed neck of the _sul'dam_ who had sought to collar her. The Leash Holder fell, her throat fountaining her lifeblood, as her _damane_ collapsed by her side, the _a'dam_ communicating the shock of her mistress's sudden death.

Marinna had no time to process the fall of these foes as the second _damane_ pressed her attack, with a honed confidence and sangfroid that attested to arduous practice and battlefield experience. The other woman was relatively weak in the Power, compared to Marinna, but it was all the Wise One could do to counter her deadly weaves, appalled by the other woman's savage intent.

At the onset, Marinna was close to being overwhelmed by the _damane_ 's impetuous aggression, gouts of Fire that sought to sear the flesh from her bones, shields laced with Compulsion, blows of Hardened Air.

The Wise One had no combat experience to speak of. _Best keep it simple, then,_ she counselled herself. Marinna weathered the storm, hardening her defences, a two-layered shield of Spirit against the threat of shielding, augmented by a robust Protective Cocoon against the more elemental threats.

The other woman beat up against her walls, and Marinna let her wear herself out, exhausting herself in her fruitless efforts, until the _damane_ was gasping for air, soaked in sweat.

Then Marinna counterattacked, throwing her main strength behind an axe of Spirit that severed the _damane's_ connection to the True Source. The _damane_ 's eyes rolled up in her head as she fell insensible, but her _sul'dam_ was clearly made of sterner stuff. She fixed Marinna with a scornful eye, even as the Wise One brought a mace of Air down upon the crown of her head. Hard enough to stun, not hard enough to kill.

Marinna regarded the downed trio. What to do with her helpless opponents?

After a moment's thought, Marinna tied off a dense cobweb of Spirit upon each of the two _damane_ in turn, interlacing the knot so intricately that it would take many hours to unravel.

As she did so, the Wise One removed the collar from both women. From what she knew of the Seanchan, some of these women chose the leash of their own volition, and would return willingly to their indenture. If this proved not to be the case, what she had done would give them a chance to escape and make a life for themselves as free women.

If they returned to bondage instead, the shield would ensure they took no further part in this battle, at least. It wasn't in Marinna to kill two defenceless adversaries. _Thank the Light._

After further consideration, she shielded the _sul'dam,_ and bound her in chains of Air. Marinna did not consider herself vengeful by nature, but she saw a natural justice in this. Let the Seanchan determine the hapless _sul'dam's_ fate, once afforded evidence of the woman's capacity to channel.

Satisfied, Marinna turned away. There were many who needed her aid, and the Power's conviction was strong upon her.


	69. Chapter 69: The Breaking Of The White

**Chapter 69: The Breaking of the White**

Moridin turned away from Semirhage, and the real assault began.

Unseen foes, slashing at him with razors of Spirit. At first no more than a distraction, isolated and sporadic attacks by single Aes Sedai. An irrelevance. They might as well seek to choke a raging river by casting paper boats into the stream. There was no cohesion to their attempt to sever him from _saidar,_ drawn through the comatose Lady of Pain. No guiding hand. Yet they mobbed him from afar, a flock of terns protecting their nest. Tiny and fierce.

But fragile.

They could not fail to mark him, and their assaults – pure Spirit – came at him, a flurry of buffeting white wings from every quadrant, through the very walls, floor and ceiling alike. To them, he was a beacon like Dragonmount.

His assailants, though weak, were dim, tiny candles in the distance he could barely track. Moridin lashed out in retaliation, clubbing fists of Spirit to crush the stronger – or nearer, and therefore luckless or over-bold – and those firefly lights went out. To be replaced by others. Foci that glowed like lamps in the night. Beneath his very feet.

The floor beneath him imploded, and Moridin fell. Even As he tumbled, he wove Protective Cocoon to armour him and Semirhage's inert body from the fall. Hardened his connections, the conduit to _saidin,_ a poniard in his left hand. A mace of _saidar_ in his right.

He fell through the tumult of broken stone, flickering deeper into Night's Shade, shortening his life by a precious minute to afford him the time to take the measure of his foes. A coterie of angry, determined Aes Sedai, green robes and shawls in a high-vaulted hall faced with green malachite and black marble. By some mischance, he stood alone in the Hall of the Green. Alone, against the strength of the Battle Ajah.

Wrath and joy filled Moridin's vaunting heart. _At last_. _A foe worthy of my strength!_

They clustered together in tight knots, and Moridin did not trouble to count. Prime circles of thirteen. The first multiplier. _Dozens of circles._ A couple hundred of the most hard-bitten, pugnacious Aes Sedai the Tower could call upon, armed with the knowledge of the secret weaves of the Green Ajah. And things that had once been forbidden. Complsion. Balefire.

They were as children.

It might have been different had they _Asha'man_ Warders. A force multiplier, enabling them to make full circles of seventy-two. Three Full Circles would have been a considerable hindrance, even for the Choedan Kal. Moridin read their weaves, a swordsman responding to a poor opponent's tell, and prepared his riposte.

Time slowing, obedient to his stilling hand, Moridin timed his counter to a nicety, hardening Protective Cocoon as he alighted adroitly against a storm of Fire that broke upon him.

The tier of long, high windows, priceless cut glass, blew inward in a shower of emerald, spears of Lightning stabbing into the transept, aimed at his heart. He whirled, weaving Earth and Fire, diverting the blinding fury of the Called Storm, scattering the bolts among his foes, ripping the ground from beneath their feet, even as he parried a swung scythe of Balefire that, deflected, reaped slender columns of black jet like wheat.

Then three circles, independently, hacked at his connection to the Source with hardened Shields of Spirit. Terrible in battle-joy, Moridin was faster, surer. Cutting the flows with just enough force to send the Aes Sedai who bearded him in his wrath reeling, the weaves snapping back into them. Executed with the surgical grace of a sword-form. Moridin could have killed them all. That wasn't his objective.

Dead, they were of no use to him.

As they reeled before him, numbed by his honed savagery, he reached out his hand in earnest. Through the Ring of Dominion. Met an instant of resistance, like the struggle to shield an opponent. A moment of concentration, akin to tapping an _angreal._ He felt their shock, their incomprehension, and finally their fear as they realised their strength was no longer their own to command.

Some stood their ground, ashen faces reflecting their shock. Others – a bare handful – gripped their skirts and ran for the exits. Some still managed an Aes Sedai stoicism, glaring their hauteur at him. Amazingly, one woman, with the braided hair of an Arafellin, actually ran at him, a knife of steel in her clenched fist. _Good instincts,_ Moridin had time to think, approvingly. The Power was not the only weapon.

None made it further than a half-dozen paces, before they were enmeshed in a serpentine snare of Air, binding them hand and foot. They would die, when he had no longer use for them, Moridin determined. But they did not deserve Semirhage's fate. They had fought bravely. He could afford them a good death. Even though they were, to a woman, Black Ajah.

He would not judge their deeds. He did not have that right.

Buoyed by the strength of two hundred Aes Sedai, in addition to the Choedan Kal, it was time to press the attack. To take the battle to the rest of the White Tower, before they could arraign their full strength to stop him. There were more than a _thousand_ of them, after all, and hundreds of Novices and Accepted who could be pressed into Circles. Even Great Circles, once Aes Sedai with _Asha'man_ Warders rallied.

They should probably flee from him, if they were truly wise. If they stayed to fight, they would still be many small circles against one behemoth. They could not hope to shield him. He doubted they had the strength and skill to cut him down. As he saw it, their only hope was to prolong the battle until he died of physical exhaustion from being the conduit for such an enormity of the Power.

Moridin would not let that happen.

He was going to tear their White Tower apart about their ears, like a man kicking apart and termite mound, scorning their petty bites as he broke the nest apart. Bring their foulness out into the Light.

A percussive upwelling of Air and Earth churned outwards from his epicentre, overthrowing walls and partitions. Cracking the flawless edifice of the white stone like a rime of frost.

It wrenched away the whole of the White Tower above his head in a fountain of broken rock, casting the rubble thousands of feet through the air to fall like thunderbolts upon Tar Valon and the surrounding plain. There were only a couple of floors above where he stood, a negligible quantity of Aes Sedai becoming collateral damage.

An archangel bearing a sword of steel, he descended upon his foes below.

* * *

Outside the Void, it was chill where he stood at the broken summit of the breached White Tower. The world stood silent and affrighted for a moment, as if appalled by the magnitude of violence he had unleashed upon it.

They were all dead, or his, or fled. Mesaana had stood against him the longest, melding the flows of seventy and two women and men, using a powerful _sa'angreal_ against him. A fluted rod of white ivory, it seemed.

At the last he had broken her glamour, wresting the power from her, and with it the Illusion she cloaked herself with. No longer a harpy of shadow, silver and bronze, the last Forsaken had grovelled before him, subjugated.

Moridin had taken her. Such strength he could ill afford to waste. Like the other Aes Sedai, he left her the agency of her wits, rather than precipitating her into the event horizon of eternity, as he had despatched Semirhage.

 _Shai'tan_ would come for him, now. As would the _Asha'man,_ and anyone else the Dark One could press into battle. Moridin's design had been laid bare. The Lord of the Grave might have found dark delight in watching Moridin attempt to assassinate the _Nae'blis._ It was another thing altogether, now Moridin had declared his hand. Unveiled his Talent, together with the terrifying capabilities of the Ring of Dominion.

Shaidar Haran would be drawn to him, too. Sooner or later.

How Moridin _longed_ for that confrontation!

They were now in a desperate race – Moridin and the Dark One. To collar and harness as many channellers, _angreal_ , and sources of the Power as possible. That was why he had come here, to the White Tower.

Semirhage – deserving of death as she was – was merely collateral damage. Moridin intended to forge a blade of the Power, with which to strike the head from the Serpent. To kill the Great Lord of the Dark, if such a thing were truly possible. And if not, to set right the calumny that this world represented.

The only way he knew how.

The winter sun, a flake of pellucid white, drawing low in its westward track, weary and affrighted, hid from Moridin's face behind the dismal grey of clouds. Yet upon a different horizon, a ruddy torch kindled. Waxed and grew dull with choler, a red giant frowning over Andor.

Moridin could _feel_ it. _Saidin_ like nothing he could imagine. The male Choedan Kal. But not just that. Hundreds, even thousands of _Asha'man_. There was _saidar,_ too. The Ayyad? Maybe the Kin, Moridin speculated.

At its heart, the rotten core of that russet, poisoned apple, bided something worse. Waiting. A Shadow that harvested light and hope out of the land and all that dwelt upon it. Darkening as its gravity stole light, collapsing in upon itself.

An event horizon, beyond which light itself could not escape. Sentient shadow, beyond a memory of light, a capering, unkind, unholy entity. Beyond comprehension. Beyond sanity. Beyond redress.

 _Shai'tan._

It was He that marshalled that brimming power. True Power, _saidin_ and _saidar_. At that moment, Moridin understood there could be no hope of victory. Even of salvation. This would have been a task beyond even the Dragon Reborn – to fight the Dark One once freed from His prison, and not waylaying Him at the bottleneck of the Bore. Shayol Ghul.

Even reality – the rules of what was and was not possible – bent to the raw edge of snapping before the Adversary's will. This burgeoning nova of _saidin_ – the Dark One drawing through hundreds of individual male channelers without apparent need of circles – was one example. An impossibility. Except that Lighteater owned those men, those _Asha'man._ Their souls, their bodies, their minds. They could not so much as think a thought that He did not permit.

Moridin filled his lungs with the frozen air, relishing the moments he had left. Set his glacial gaze upon the deadlight that bent Its will upon him across the gulf of hundreds of leagues.

Moridin did not shout his challenge, knowing his quiet words would carry to the ends of the earth. To where his Enemy crouched in ambush.

"I set my face against you, Unhallowed. As I should always have done, from the beginning! I shall stand for all those you have silenced through the arts of your malice. For Ilyena the Fair, and all the others, over the eons.

I am their voice, raised in condemnation. I stand for the Light, not because I am worthy, but because I must! Better that the Banner be held aloft, stained by the blood on my hands than cast down in base surrender! I will _never_ give you that victory again. I will hold to what is good, and right, and true, for its own sake and not cede my heart's ground to despair."

His words fell into a watchful, brooding silence, and found no answer, save the keening of the wind. If the Dark One's mind couched a response, it was hidden from Moridin.


	70. Chapter 70: Apocalypse

**Chapter 70: Apocalypse**

Mat and Lan faced each other across the Library.

The King of Malkier cut a martial figure, his long shanks girt in sand-scoured steel, the clothyard rule of his sword, Fadebane scabbarded upon his left hip. Yet his hands were bare, callused fingers stained with the indigo mark of ink. His gauntlets lay upon the table-top, impromptu paperweights preventing the map from scrolling up.

His head was bare, too, close-cropped hair iron-grey, the mark of the _hadori_ written into the Man Alone. A face hewn from granite, topped with the unlikely accoutrement of a pair of spectacles – ground Cairhienin glass inset in a delicate frame of _s'redit_ ivory. The King's gaze was owlish behind them, bleary and impatient at once. The effect should have been comical, but wasn't. An owl upon a branch, watching his unwary prey with avid hunger. Ready to stoop, a silent shadow stealing life.

By contrast, the younger man was fidgety, his body restless in a high-backed wooden chair. Booted feet upon the table-top, long-fingered hands playing catlike, rattling the rim of the table in an impatient drum-roll. _Jac o'the Shadows._

Lan frowned at him. "Maitrim, would you stop that, for the love of the Light?"

The Raven Prince met his gaze with mild surprise. "Uh. Yes. Sorry, Lan. Thinking."

"Think quietly, then."

"He's always been like that" the young Yellow Sister interjected, with a sniff. Both men turned around. "Thinking's always proved hard for my brother. That's why he's always preferred merely doing. Unpremeditated chaos." Bodewhin's expression was guileless behind the inciteful words, as she took a sip of her tea. There was sibling mischief in her almond eyes.

"Me?" Mat sputtered. "And who is it that decided to defy the Amyrlin's edict to come to Malkier, pray tell, sister dearest? A good thing that you came to Nynaeve first" Mat continued meaningfully.

Bode was strong in the Power, true enough, but Nynaeve was stronger, to the extent that a mere suggestion from the former Wisdom carried the weight of an order. Poor Bode. Nynaeve was senior in age, power, and had been her Wisdom in Emond's Field besides. She hadn't had a chance. It was sorrowful enough a tale to make a stone weep.

Mat grinned.

Bode contrived to miss Mat's levity, her face opaque. Aes Sedai serenity was an elder sister's dress she was growing into, a poor fit for her impulsive nature. His younger sibling had been every bit as fond of pranks as he'd been himself. She got away with far more, of course, being a girl. Butter wouldn't melt, and all that.

A bloody good thing that Nynaeve had taken her in hand, Mat reflected. It was hard enough to fight a battle without having to look over your shoulder making sure that your scapegrace siblings weren't managing to get into trouble in the mean time. An elder brother's lot was a hard one, make no mistake about it!

At least here – in the Library of the Seven Towers – she ought to be safely out of harm's way. Not to mention useful. His sister had the Talent for making Gateways!

For some reason, her Talent was failing her now, leaving his eyes blind as battle raged upon the heights. "Bode. Any chance you can try and open another Gateway above the Bothy?" His long-fingered hands sketched a playing-card sized aperture in illustration. "Just a little one. I just want to sneak a peek, not get a sword through the brisket."

Bode's face narrowed with concentration. Almost instantly, a neat silver rectangle snapped into being, as neat a trick as a cardsharp producing an ace from his sleeve. He should know. Not that he himself would ever stoop so low, but a fellow had to know how less scrupulous men would try and rook him, given half a chance.

The tiny Gateway rotated, Bode positioning it neatly above the table, parallel to the map. His sister's hands described an expansive motion, and, to Mat's consternation, the Gateway increased correspondingly, until it matched the map's extent exactly.

"No! No, no, no, no! Bode, did you not hear me? I just want to be able to look through, not open a _flaming_ door big enough for a _s'redit_ to lumber through!"

Bodewhin favoured him with a pained look. "Little you know, Maitrim!" she told him, her voice icy. "It's just a projection. A lens, like a telescope. The gateway's still here. In my hands."

Mat squinted disbelievingly, seeing that his sister spoke the truth. A neat black square still hovered between her palms. "Bode, that has to be the best sleight-of-hand I have _ever_ …" Impulsively, he squeezed her shoulder. "When this is over, you and I should play some bridge. I know some respectable inns… Well, _almost_ respectable, anyway." Mat qualified, honestly enough.

"Maitrim Cauthon, are you seriously suggesting that I impugn the dignity of the White Tower by going helling with you, using the One Power to abet your _ta'veren_ abilities to cheat at cards?"

Mat smirked. "Yes, I believe that's exactly what I was proposing, to the letter."

"Thought as much" Bode sniffed, before sniggering. "Why not? I'm like to be drummed out of the White Tower just as soon as Cadsuane catches up with me, anyway. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb."

"I hate to interrupt you two" Lan interjected dryly, "but if you two hayhairs are quite done, I suggest we take a look through Bodewhin's Gateway. Now!"

Mat looked down. "Not that I'm complaining, but it would be good if I could see the map, and the view through the Gateway side-by-side."

"Perhaps I can show you something better" Bode told him, with a satisfied insouciance. A cat with a saucer of milk. The view through the Gateway projection grew more transparent, even as it rotated to align exactly with the contours of the map.

As an afterthought, Bode added a scale index, and then stretched the image into a three-dimensional topography, complete with the bothy, its defences and the men and women who fought upon it. A perfect scale model.

The Raven Prince's remote gaze interrogated the battlefield. Lost in thought, he wasn't even aware that he'd doffed his broad-brimmed hat, arms folded behind his back as he studied the precipitously-balanced contest.

Bodewhin Cauthon watched Mat, feeling a chill traverse her spine. This was not the brother she had grown up with. Head bowed as if in mourning, hard and cold as _cuendillar_ , he was at that moment a man cast in the same stamp as the King of Malkier.

A pang of grief wounded Bode's breast, even as a cerebral part of her reflected: _so it is true then. The past-lives hypothesis that Moraine Damodred spoke of._

Just as al'Lan Mandragoran was the archetype of the Diademed Malkieri Battle Lord, her brother was much more than Maitrim Cauthon, yeoman of the Two Rivers. In essence, he was Buriyn and Aemon al'Caar and every fighting man who had bled and died for the Mountain Home. The Old Blood ruled him. _Tai'shar Manetheren._

 _A thorn to the Dark One's side, and a bramble for his hand._

After a pause that might have been an age, Maitrim Cauthon turned to Lan, addressing him with wintry certainty. His voice was different, too. Ancient. The bedrock of a Two Rivers accent, as he caressed the word he uttered.

"Apocalypse. Do you know the origin of the word, _Aan'allein_?"

Lan nodded, his answer prompt. A soldier addressing his superior. "Yes, Rodholder" he replied, using the ancient form. "In the High Speech, it has two meanings. A day of great judgement. And something revealed. Something awful."

Mat Cauthon nodded. "Yes. That time is now at hand, Battle Lord. A time of revelation and wrath. Raise the Crane Banner and rally the iron knights of Malkier! Dawn comes, and with it the Light and Justice."


	71. Chapter 71: Gambit

**Chapter 71: Gambit**

 _Flaming crooked-horned son of a fat-arsed Wetland ox!_

Muradin cursed as he struggled manfully to drag the armour-clad bulk of the Taardad chieftain out of harm's way by main force. Of course, the man he was trying to aid would _have_ to be a ruddy giant! The Shaido slipped, feet losing traction upon the muddy, slick surface, falling upon his backside.

Rain fell, saturating the _gai'shain's_ white robes, which were stained pink in patches with other men's watered blood. The hilltop was an open-air abattoir, the air close with the metallic odour of it, blood and ordure. The plateau was steadily flooding, the rain's benison turned into a curse, steeped crimson and befouled. A treacherous place.

The tide of the battle had turned. _Cadin'sor_ -clad figures stalked the night, lithe as wolves, hunting down straggling Seanchan soldiers. The musketeers in particular paid a heavy price, the rain rendering their weapons ineffective. The lightly-armoured infantry were easy prey for their pursuers, short-swords no match for ruthless Aiel spears in the dark.

Visibility was poor, even for keen Aiel eyes, restricted to a few dozen yards by the squalling rain. Muradin could just about make out the shape of the bothy through the gloom. Surely there he would find a Wise One or an _Asha'man_ who knew Healing, who could attend to Ronam. He tried not to think of the dangers. Seanchan cared not whether an Aiel was _gai'shain_ or no.

Ronam's eyes were open, blinking weakly as they focused upon Muradin, eyelashes impregnated by fat droplets of water. He was a grimy mess, his long red hair liberally befouled by the mud Muradin had laboriously dragged him through. The Stone Dog's expression was quizzical. "Where am I, _gai'shain_?" the big man rumbled.

"Shut up" Muradin told him, for the umpteenth time. Ronam, lapsing in and out of consciousness, kept asking the same thing, blacking out before hearing the answer.

"Flaming Shaido dogrobber" Ronam grumbled, then, "That .. creature I killed. Bring it to me, _gai'shain_. Reckon its pelt would make an admirable cloak."

Muradin laughed incredulously. "Aye, sure, Stone Dog. I could barely pry its heavy carcase off you. If you want it, you'll have to go back for it yourself."

"Typical" Ronam muttered thickly. "Shaido. Weak as dishwater. Do everything myself."

Muradin scowled down at him, hands planted upon his hips. "Shall I leave your thick-set arse here in the mud? Or would you prefer some Healing and medicine, and a roof over your head?"

Ronam grunted, waving a hand airily. "No, you're alright. Never thought there could be such a thing as too much water" he mused. "Yet here we are. A skin of _oosquai_ in the dry would not go amiss."

"You're not wrong there, Stone Dog."

The two men shared a grin.

"If you wouldn't mind, _gai'shain_?" Ronam suggested.

"Don't mention it, I'm sure" griped Muradin. "Have you ever considered a diet, big man?"

"Not really. Both my wives are fine cooks. It would incur me great _toh_ if I insulted them so."

* * *

"Slaughter them" Daved Mhor snarled.

His black-garbed killers ripped into the column of Seanchan men-at-arms. The tightly-packed body of men were defenceless against the One Power. What they did was no more than sanctioned murder.

A rolling tsunami of Earth and Fire broke upon the soldiers in concentrated fury, his _Asha'man_ standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder in a single line that matched the breadth of the column. Better to keep a close drill in this murk, so every man could see his fellow. It would also concentrate the effect of their assault.

The roused earth beat down men with golem-like blows, crushing them alive within their carapace of armour, before the destructive weave ran out of impetus, the broken ground choked with a detritus of rubble and crushed bodies, forming a hillock between the surviving Seanchan soldiery and the channellers.

Daved Mhor raised a hand and his _Asha'man_ ceased. He quelled the pity that arose in his breast with a heavy hand. It was not mercy that had granted the surviving Seanchan a stay of execution.

It was simply easier to allow the remainder to march into the killing zone, without having to expend the energy plowing through the interposing obstacle first. If the foe broke and routed, Daved intended to let them go, but as long as they possessed the will to fight, he intended to keep on killing them – whether they advanced, or retreated in good order, or simply stood their ground.

He was a Soldier. He was a Dragon.

The first of the enemy soldiers surmounted the hillock of broken earth, advancing in good order. "Wait for my word of command!" Daved bellowed, his voice Power-amplified into a clarion call.

The soldiers of the Raven Empire were brave men. They did not falter, incited to their task by the drum-beat, held to duty by the example of their captains, who boldly fronted the columns, coolly walking towards certain death, the officer's swords upon their right shoulder in parade rest. It was a waste of courage, Daved Mhor reflected, to send them to their deaths thus, unsupported.

"At my command – Iron Storm" the _M'Hael_ commanded. There were many ways to kill men, but men who could channel tended to have a great facility for weaves involving Earth and Fire.

"NOW!"

The Iron Storm targeted the soldier's metal armour and weapons, a powerful magnetic charge rending and tearing at the protective garb, turning it into a storm of shrapnel that harrowed flesh. The assault also earthed the hapless men-at-arms' equipment, turning them into a giant lightning rod.

The brooding sky overhead, incited into torment by the _damane's_ channelling, bruited darkling. An aegis of wrath, hurling lightning bolts, magnesium ribbons of forking white light that blasted earth and stone, and smote reeling men into oblivion. The secondary assault finished what the Iron Storm had begun.

Improbably, some few men survived the cataclysm, broken figures, half-blinded, deafened by the sound and fury, limping away into the night. Daved Mhor was inclined to let them go. He was tired of slaughter. Not of killing, mind.

The lightning fell amongst his own men, taking them by surprise. A half-dozen fell before they could ward off the stroke from on high. That was no accident. _Damane._ The infantry column had been a gambit. A cold-hearted sacrifice, designed to gather his priceless _Asha'man_ together in one place, and ambush them.

Daved Mhor scrambled to his feet. There was blood in his mouth and the black wool of his fine high-collared coat was soiled with mud. Yet he was laughing grimly, a dark tempest of wrath possessing him utterly as he stared his challenge at the pairs of women marching towards his men out of the night. He stopped counting at fourscore _damane_. There were more, though. A lot more.

It was one thing to spring the trap. Quite another to take down forty men who wore the Sword and Dragon of the _Asha'man._

"At last, my lads!" Daved Mhor growled. "Now we get a proper fight! Let's show these ladies how the men of the Black Tower make war!"


	72. Chapter 72: Mosk and Merk

**Chapter 72: Mosk And Merk**

The dragon-breath glare threatening the horizon retracted into a single point, as sharply-defined as the Pole Star. Red as blood. That was the only warning Moridin had. In the next heartbeat, he was joined to the source of that baleful light by a cataract of Fire, fifty feet wide, refracting through the atmosphere to strike at him where he stood exposed upon the broken stones of what had once been the Hall of the Green.

Moridin had scant chance to react, reaching out with a dozen tornadoes of Air to draw upon the Erinin below. He drew a churning deluge of muddy river water, funnelling the torrents into a single stream, aimed at the heart of the cherry-red gout of flame that sought to incinerate him where he stood.

Scalding steam boiled from the interaction, a mere quarter-mile from where he stood, wicking away around the shield of Air Moridin had erected behind for that purpose. He could feel the backdraft around him as the roaring flames consumed the oxygen that surrounded him for fuel. Smell the stench of burning stone as the deflected sheets of flame burned the limestone surface of the White Tower to porous calcium oxide that blackened, crumbled and broke under his feet.

The force of the assault shook him even as the White Tower's masonry groaned beneath him. It was only a matter of time before either the brittle building beneath him broke like wrought iron under the hammer, or the inferno that beat against his desperate defences scoured him away.

Concentrating desperately, Moridin wove. He tied off the flows to the river and to the insulating shield of Air, whilst he split his energies in twain.

 _Two_ great shields, solid hemispheres of Air, Earth and Fire surrounding the White Tower, the one inside the other. _Tsorovan'vadin._ The Protective Cocoon. He formed them touching one another, and then dragged them apart, creating a vacuum between them.

He was just in time. The next instant, the paltry defences of Water and Air that had been his firebreak were overrun.

The firestorm broke over the Protective Cocoon, and all Moridin could see was an enormity of magenta flame, forcing him to shut his eyes against the glare. Yet the shields held.

Conduction, convection and radiation. That was how heat propagated, Moridin knew. The vacuum between the two shields ensured that radiant heat was the only kind he had to worry about, whilst the shields themselves were efficient conductors, drawing the heat into the ground.

The outer shield began to glow, nonetheless, like a tungsten filament, turning a brilliant white. How long the dome would hold, Moridin did not know, as he tied off the flows. But he could not simply huddle behind his protection, anyway.

He was running out of time.

Moridin struck back, a pulse of concentrated white light that would pass through his shields without destroying them. Distilled and focused into a finger-fine flow. Light was a weapon, too. One much more effective than mere heat.

Moridin's counterstroke was brief in duration, an arrow loosed with the instinct of the Oneness guiding his aim towards his adversary at the Black Tower, and he felt it fly true, refracting through the atmosphere.

He was rewarded by the cessation of his enemy's Fire attack, and for a moment, Moridin allowed himself to hope that he had slain the man who directed the Dark One's assault. Then he felt resistance to his flows, and knew that he had been countered.

Moridin grimaced at his failure, commencing the weaves for a second assault. His enemy had more strength at his disposal to draw upon than he himself did. But for all the ferocity and raw might of his attacks, the leader of the _Asha'man_ was operating under constraints. This world was the Dark One's possession, jealously-guarded. The _M'hael_ who directed the assault would not be permitted to do anything that might destroy it.

 _How ironic._ Moridin acknowledged no such limitations.

Moridin released two simultaneous weaves. One of Balefire, the other a sinusoidal wave of pure Earth that Moridin fed into the ground. The second weave was diffuse where he himself stood, but Moridin could still feel the ache of what he had done in his bones, as if his body was a tuning-fork that had been struck.

The bar of Balefire, a waist-thick ribbon, flared like burning magnesium as it leapt from his hand, a stone skipping from the millpond surface of the atmosphere to strike at the _Asha'man_.

* * *

Logain Ablar – withered, corrupted and strong – clutched the Access Key to his breast as he bestrode the battlements of the Dark Keep. His left hand gripped the cupola tight enough to whiten his knuckles. Drunk upon _saidin,_ he trembled with the need to reach beyond the horizon and close his hand upon the puny human vessel that dared withstand him. It was an ague, a longing. A compulsion.

 _Saidin_ in these quantities had a song. Couching a need to dominate and subjugate. Crooning. Keening. It was the voice of pride.

Resistance demanded punishment. Retribution. Moridin was drawing upon the strength of the very Aes Sedai who had stilled Logain and beaten him, those who would have executed him for the effrontery of claiming to be the Dragon Reborn.

Logain had taken every Aes Sedai he could, in spite and scorn of Mesaana's threats. Particularly the Reds. These, he had cruelly put to death. He had been able to do so with impunity only because of the tacit support of the _Nae'blis,_ Semirhage. Now, Logain had the strength and mandate to do what he had always dreamed of. To destroy the Aes Sedai, and pull down the White Tower!

After this day, he would be answerable to no-one but the Great Lord. He would ascend to the ranks of the Chosen, become _Nae'blis._ Lieutenant over the whole world.

And upon that day, the women of the world would have occasion to weep. For Logain Ablar loved them not.

The tusked summit of the Black Tower bore testament to the struggle, punctured neatly through by a stilletto-wound. A perfectly circular hole a yard in diameter that transfixed the body of his fortress. He had deflected Moridin's arcane pulse of light at the last instant with a mirrored buckler of Air and Water. Had the Great Lord not forewarned him of the stroke, telling him how to counter it, Logain would be dead.

This was glorious! They were striving like the war gods of yore, Mosk and Merk contending with spears of Fire, bestriding the plain of the World. Moridin was strong, too, and subtle with it. A worthy foe.

By contrast, Moridin's follow-up assault was pitiably slow, easy to counter, as Logain scried the tell-tale cold white light of Balefire from afar.

 _Running out of tricks, Moridin?_ In that instant, the _M'hael_ heard a cold voice within his mind that was not his own. Warning him that Moridin's attack was a feint, a distraction.

The Great Lord showed him the standing-wave of Earth that the former Forsaken had propagated into the ground, whose epicentre would break here, at the Black Tower. A weave that would break the thin surface of solid ground like the skin on milk heated in a saucepan, dragging the Tower down to the scalding, liquid depths beneath.

Logain Ablar felt a moment then of what might have been pity for his adversary. Or perhaps contempt. Moridin might be strong and subtle, but no man could hope to deceive the Great Lord. Not even one whose mind was shielded from the Lord of the Grave, as Moridin's was. As soon as thought became action, _Shai'tan_ would know of it.

This world and all that was in it was part of the Great Lord's _sarx,_ the flesh of His body. Thus, nothing was hidden from him. Every scheme laid bare.

A lick of white flame started from Logain Ablar's outstretched hand, a spear of Balefire transfixing the Heavens, parrying Moridin's weave. At the same instant, Logain wove Earth into the ground beneath the Black Tower, a standing-wave that was the mirror-image of Moridin's to nullify it, stabilizing the ground beneath his fortress.

Planting his feet, Logain braced himself for the brazen tolling-bell aftershocks he anticipated, the consequence of the temporal anomaly of two streams of Balefire meeting. Balefire was a weave that did more than merely destroy. It unwove the Pattern locally, changing how the past itself was written.

The two ribbons of white light intersected in a soundless conflagration two leagues from where Logain stood. The _M'hael_ felt consciousness itself refract, dividing in that moment. A consequence of the paradox, the moment the two streams of Balefire interacted as unknowable as the instant the universe was created.

For a distilled instant, Logain saw the world through Moridin's eyes, perceiving time unspooling backwards towards the instant Moridin unleashed his Balefire. He could see the track of the white fire like summer lightning, arcing across the sky, a spark jumping between the White and Dark Towers. Feel the residue of Moridin's released weave – hateful, alien _saidar_ – becoming less diffuse, sharper and more concentrated as time unravelled backwards towards the moment of weaving.

As if from afar, Logain heard the warning cry from the Great Lord, a murder of crows exploding from their rookery in alarm. A raptor scream of balked, cheated rage. A sawtoothed harmonic wrung from the guts of the Earth. And in that moment, Logain Ablar understood how he had been tricked. How the Lord of the Grave had been deceived.

A pinioned giant, casting off his shackles, the Earth rose up against its bonds, overthrowing all constraints. Overturning and ploughing under the fragile covering of solid ground. A once-becalmed ocean of molten rock enraged into a sudden storm, marched by precipitous ocean waves of magma a half-mile in height. A tract of Andor fifty miles in radius, reclaimed by the Earth.

The Black Tower, caught upon the crest of one such billow, foundered and wallowed for an instant, a river-barge caught by an ocean storm, before its long keel of solid bedrock broke, and the wreckage was snatched down into fathomless, searing depths with all hands lost.

* * *

Gasping with exertion, Moridin sank to his knees amongst the broken stones, still clutching both sword and _ter'angreal_ in a death-grip. The Power coursing through the conduit of his body, slick in his grasp, a leviathan he wrestled with.

Through one viewpoint, the world was a deterministic endeavour. Billiard balls, caroming around a table-top after the impact of a cue ball. Predictable. Quantifiable. A world where your intentions were transparent. Where you could not hope to defeat the Dark Enemy. And yet, through another lens, it was quantum. You could cheat the perceived immutability of the law of cause and effect.

There had been one possibility where Moridin had chosen to use the Standing Wave of Earth. Another, where he had not. _Heads. Tails._ Moridin had put the decision in the hands of chance. A toss of the coin, covering whether the outcome was heads or tails. Hiding the true outcome even from his own mind. He'd called blind. _Heads._

The Balefire interaction had rewound the battle with Logain to the instant when the choice had been made. Then Moridin revealed how the coin had truly fallen. _Tails._

 _Ta'veren._

Logain, of course, had done the same thing twice.

And instead of cancelling out Moridin's Standing Wave, the _M'Hael_ had destroyed himself instead. Breaking the very ground upon which he stood.

Grimly, purposefully, Moridin used the long blade of _Justice_ to leverage himself back to his feet, his limbs trembling with the effort like a new-born calf, sodden with sweat. Yet he stood.

There was one rule, above all else, for being a man.

 _Whatever comes, face it upon your feet._


	73. Chapter 73: Eloi

**Chapter 73: Eloi**

Andor was a bleeding weal that polluted the skyline with its filth, a bloated deathbag spreading out to pall the air with a suppurating cloud of ash. A stillborn placental sac, tethered to the Earth's womb by an umbilical cord of smoke and flame.

This would be no Dragonmount, Moridin reflected. No fire-mountain spewing its pyroclastic flows upon the land below. It would be the opposite. A sunken crater, unquiet and hungry, dragging the quilt of surrounding land into it.

As he watched, the outer demense of Caemlyn, the New City within its wall of grey stone, began to slide inexorably into the gulf, borne upon the strata of stone beneath. Its populace would be dead anyway, choked by the noxious clouds of poison gas issued forth from the depths of the earth.

He had dealt his human foes a mortal blow. The blowback of the destruction of Logain Ablar and his _Asha'man_ , together with the Access Key of the male Choedan Kal, reverberated across the world. The access key had been in use at the moment of destruction.

Moridin had felt, rather than seen, the result, through the eyes of the One Power. A second cataclysmic explosion, far away, hidden from sight by the curvature of the Earth, centred upon the island of Tremalking, where the statue of the male Choedan Kal stood.

 _Once_ stood.

Now tsunami raced towards the margins of the Aryth Ocean, waves of water travelling faster than the sound of their passage. Within hours, the eastern seaboard of Seanchan would be overrun by mountains of water, which would not be turned back by anything until they met the Aldael mountain range. Much of the west coast of this continent would already be drowned, the great city of Ebou Dar – even the great fortress of the Stone of Tear – smeared away by the tide like a child's sandcastle. The greatest cataclysm since the Breaking.

Yet for all the devastation he had wrought, Moridin had dealt neither the Great Lord nor his Dark World a mortal blow. Given time, the super-volcano he had created would stabilize in size, scab over.

His smile was feral. _I destroyed the world, once,_ mad Lews Therin had told Ishamael in the fever of the long dream. _You can, too, if you try hard._

 _If you try hard._

The day retreated before Moridin in dismay into a cold, clear twilight as the chill clutched at his garb. The Moon rose, pale, gibbous. Waxing. _Close._

Could he?

Death reached out, eager, through the female Choedan Kal, a many-fingered hand of Earth. Through them, Moridin caressed the scarred surface of a lifeless world.

He closed his fist, eyes clenching with the strain as he hauled upon the celestial body. If he could succeed in pulling the satellite from its orbit, the tidal forces would do more than simply move the oceans. The land itself would flow. If he managed to drag the massive moon within a close enough proximity, the forces would pull the Moon apart, and the Earth with it. The two celestial bodies would become as one. A writhing ball of magma...

 _Saidar_ disappeared, a clean cut severing him from the female Choedan Kal. The Ring of Dominion upon his finger pulsed, suddenly as hot as a branding-iron before shattering like glass. Moridin ached at the loss.

He understood. Moridin might have captivated the minds of the Aes Sedai and Semirhage, but their bodies – and the life within – belonged to the Lord of the Grave. The enormity of what had been taken from him was so absolute that at first, Moridin didn't register that he still held _saidin_. A drip of water beside the faucet of Power that he had been drinking from. His own meagre ability, unaugmented.

He was thirst! He could not be quenched by an ocean!

 _Until shade is gone. Until water is gone._ An echo from another man's life.

Then even that strength was no longer his own to command. A shadow fell upon him as _saidin_ disappeared.

Slowly, Moridin turned to face Shaidar Haran.

There was neither amusement nor contempt upon the face of the Great Lord now. Just wrath, as he towered above Moridin, standing atop the broken White Tower like a statue upon its plinth. The building groaned under his oppressive weight, quailing under the dread that cloaked him.

Moridin clutched the hilt of _Justice_ like a talisman to ward off evil. If Shaidar Haran noticed the sword, he paid it no mind. Yet it was a symbol of his defiance. A briar for the Dark One's hand. A thorn for his foot.

WHO ARE YOU TO SET YOUR FACE AGAINST ME, SON OF MAN? YOU ARE MY CREATURE. MY DARKHOUND. WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU CAN DEFY ME? EVEN THE DRAGON REBORN COULD NOT DO SO, HERE, WHERE I HAVE BROKEN THE ANNULUS OF THE KARAETHON CYCLE.

YOU STAND OUTSIDE OF THE LIGHT. OUTSIDE OF PROPHECY. OUTSIDE OF HOPE.

"It matters not" Moridin managed, mastering his dread and revulsion. His words were little more than a whisper through chattering teeth. "If all you say is true, still I would curse your name. I am here to make atonement, if naught else. Here will I die, but not as your dog. As a wolf, your blood upon my teeth!"

Shaidar Haran uttered grisly laughter through gravestone teeth.

YOU ARE NOTHING, SON OF MAN. THE SHADOW CAST BY THE DRAGON, NO MORE. A DOG THAT BITES THE HAND THAT FEEDS IT SHALL HAVE ITS TEETH DRAWN.

The weight of the Dark One's will, his words, an unbearable burden upon Moridin's shoulders. A weight that would break his back. Moridin snarled with effort as he fought against the inexorable force pushing him to his knees. Grinding his face to the floor. He held fast to the sword, though he no longer had the strength in his arm to wield it.

Shaidar Haran's boot upon his neck. The Great Lord's words were cruel hooks, fastening into the bruised flesh of Moridin's soul. His self-loathing and guilt. The shame he carried. There was an avuncular understanding, amused contempt in the Hand of the Dark's voice as his words dissected Moridin, as he squirmed like a worm gaffed upon the hook.

IF YOU WILL NOT BE MINE, THEN YOU WILL NOT BEAR THE NAME I ALLOWED YOU IN YOUR HUBRIS.

 _I_ AM DEATH, NOT YOU, MORTAL. I AM THE END OF ALL THINGS. THE **NO** TO THE CREATOR'S **YES.** THE DRAGON REBORN WAS THE LORD OF THE MORNING. I AM LORD OF THE TWILIGHT. NIGHT DRAWS NIGH, AND AN END TO ALL THINGS.

Moridin screamed as the choking wire of the Dark One's words tightened about his throat.

YOU ARE NO LONGER MORIDIN. YOU ARE NO LONGER ISHAMAEL, BETRAYER OF HOPE. WILL YOU BE ELAN MORIN ONCE MORE – PITIABLE SENSITIVE CHILD, WEAK, FORSWORN AS HE WAS?

NO, I SEE YOU CANNOT. YOU DROWNED HIM IN ALL THE BLOOD YOU SHED FOR ME OVER THE LONG YEARS. I NAME YOU _NITHING._

A MAN WITHOUT A NAME IS NOT A PERSON BUT A THING. THE GRAVE YAWNS OPEN FOR YOU NOW, NITHING, BUT I FEAR THAT YOUR DURESS WILL NEVER END.

FOR YOU, THE WORM SHALL NEVER DIE, AND THE FIRE SHALL NOT BE QUENCHED. THAT IS THE PUNISHMENT FOR YOUR REBELLION.

Shaidar Haran paused in his peroration as the man who had once been known as Moridin stilled, as if accepting his fate. The Dark One's avatar slowly drew a long, dark blade from his side, the length of a ship's mainmast. Something grim, forged from the darkness itself. He laid it upon the condemned man's neck, marking the spot to strike.

With an effort, the mortal turned his head towards Shaidar Haran's, and in spite of himself, the Hand of the Dark recoiled at the heat in Elan Morin's fearless gaze.

With a snarl, teeth bared with determination, Elan hewed _Justice_ into Shaidar Haran's massive foot – the only part of his adversary he could reach.

The Hand of the Dark recoiled with a mandrake scream of anguish that bored through Elan Morin's head. The crushing mass that pinned Elan Morin to the floor was withdrawn, and he surged upright, something small and hard and bright, a shard of diamond that glittered balefully under the colossal figure of Shaidar Haran towering above.

I AM _**ELOI**_! he declared, certainty ringing from every syllable, and for all his might, the Dark One hesitated before him, suddenly unsure.

I HAVE FOUND MY SONG! NOT FOR ME THE SONG OF GROWING. I AM NOT THE DRAGON REBORN. HE IS ALPHA. I AM OMEGA. HE IS MERCY. I AM JUSTICE. LIFE IS IN HIS GIFT. DEATH IS IN MINE. FOR YOU LIE. _I_ AM DEATH. YOU ARE ONLY CORRUPTION.

I AM _**ELOI**_. LORD OF THE EVENING. I AM THE DEATH THAT ENDS TORMENT. I AM THE COMPASSION OF FINAL RELEASE. I AM THE FINAL ARBITER. I AM YOUR END, _SHAI'TAN._ I AM THE CREATOR'S YES. _**I AM THAT I AM**_.

There were tears starting in Eloi's eyes, scalding, as they furrowed tracks down his dirty dust-stained face, Shaidar Haran saw, uncomprehendingly. At the moment when this mortal was most divine, his words, ringing with authority, falling like hammer-blows, he was also the most quintessentially human, full of the empty frailty and emotionality of these self-important creatures.

The wound that Eloi had dealt him had maimed him, the bloodless gash a shrill agony, leaving him halt and lamed. A wound that refused to heal. It should have been impossible to hurt his corporeal form to this extent.

Not that it mattered. Shaidar Haran was just a projection of His malice and might. A foreshadowing. Even if this dauntless little man managed somehow to kill this body, the Great Lord was a foe beyond the reach of his arm. Shaidar Haran's death would smart the Great Lord, perhaps inflict permanent pain and injury upon him, but He would go on.

The pent darkness in Shaidar Haran's hands thickened, solidifying into a mace that blotted out the day's last light as he raised it aloft to dash out Eloi's life upon the altar of the White Tower.

* * *

Eloi looked up, dauntless under the hammer of Ruin that threatened his obliteration. This was the end. Better than he could have hoped or dreamed. He would end this world, if he could, the Mother that bore him, because he loved what it had been before it had become despoiled. He knew it intimately, had grieved the fall of every sparrow. Now there was only the palliative remedy of death to offer, the last sanction.

There was nothing left to save here, nothing that did not defame the memory of what had been before, when this world was young. It was a grief beyond measure.

Yet his heart had been broken and remade so many times that he could bear it, would bear it, and endure in the knowledge that there were other worlds than this. Excising the cancer that had taken root here would preserve those realities. And in them, the hope that had been young in this world lived on.

 _Justice and mercy._

The sword in his hand began to glow balefully. _Red sky at night, shepherd's delight._ An ember. Flint striking steel in the darkness as night fell in shadow. The barest glimmer of light, but the darkness could not overcome it. A lament for the long night this world had endured.

Eloi knew what was needed.

 _You will know the time,_ a voice hailed him, down the pathways of memory. _The time when the price is worth the gain, and there is no other choice left to you. That is called 'Sheathing the Sword.' Remember it._

Smoothly, without hesitation, Eloi reversed the blade so that he gripped the blade by the tip. The keen steel laid open the palm of his hand, but he bore that no mind as he set the hilt upon the ground, bracing it in a crack between the flags. He placed his breast against the point, above his heart, bent his head forward, and fell forward upon the thirsty blade.

There was an instant of pain, and then a cleansing white light that banished even thought.

* * *

The Dark One was immortal, an entity almost beyond death. Where the Creator stood apart from the worlds he had created, the Lord of the Grave, in his lust to possess all things to the utmost, had written himself deep into the fabric of all things, all the worlds. He was Corruption, but also Entropy.

Even though he hated and feared the Creator, he was used, unwittingly, to fashion His higher purpose. The Creator's servants found their dignity and calling in rising above the torments the Dark One fashioned for them through deliberate malice, and even the lesser wounds the Adversary allotted by chance – illness, sickness and random death – became part of the grand design.

Killing the Dark One would bring an end to creation.

Yet here, in his hubris, the Lord of the Grave had impregnated this world with his essence. Across the Dark Worlds, his immortal soul was housed in mortal flesh. His bones, mountain ranges. His fingers, the swords of his armies. His mind imprisoned in a physical brain whose cells were the minds of his subjects.

 _Shai'tan_ was a miser, weakened with hunger as he hoarded the coins of his possessions to him. He thought himself strong in his dominion, when in fact, he was at his most vulnerable.

The sword _Justice_ plunged home into Eloi's breast, stilling his mortal heart. All the energy that Moridin and the Dragon Reborn had amassed as they strove above Dragonmount – the wrath of all the worlds, the tension between the realities – was brought to bear through the scalpel of Eloi's spirit and will.

A blade sharp enough to break any fetter, to sever soul from spirit, to separate the sinew of the Dark One's will from the limbs it articulated. A sword of Spirit that struck everywhere at once, driving the Adversary's soul – blinded, witless and without memory – back into the tracts between the Mirrors of the Wheel. A discorporate shade, barely sentient, fleeing in dread before the unveiling of the Light.

And across reality, the Dark Worlds were extinguished, and came to naught.

7


	74. Chapter 74: A Peaceable Man

**Chapter 74: House of the Hawk**

The young morning sun was a cool liquid drop of honey, fresh from a broken comb, low in the sky, stretching Mordred's reaching shadow on before it, black and twisted in silhouette. It crested above the Emperor's standard – a hawk stooping from a blue, innocent sky, framed by a stylized sunburst – so that the Paendrag hawk appeared to be breaking through into this Mirror of the Wheel from another dimension, a fantastical world of allegory, outstretched talons rending a Gateway so that for an instant, two suns shone.

Light stippled metal, rilling mercurial from spearpoints to plash onto the smooth, planished surface of shaped metal – conical helms and breastplates. The lacquered finish of Deathwatch Guardsmen's armour – midnight reds and greens – drank in the morning at a draught, brimming satiated and sleek from that cavalcade of stern Men and Ogier.

The war host of the Raven Empire had come, a glacier bright that carved the valley's breadth, pent between the low hills. A harlequin cloak of green and red and gold that the land wore, prideful as any _Da'concion_. Now they paused beneath their banners, and let the rumour of their wrath run on before them.

Mordred walked forward of the Seanchan host alone, out from amongst the bracketing thicket of long lances. There was a long stave of Andoran yew in his right hand, as tall as his own height, capped with nocks of horn, grooved to take a string. A Two Rivers bowstave, the thick staff faintly greasy to the touch, painted with a hydrophobic seal of wax and tallow. His father's gift to him on his fifteenth name-day.

 _You will grow into this one, Abell,_ Mat had told him when he had cut and shaped the wood, leaving the war bow unstrung. _You will know the time yourself. When you have the strength._

The stave was faintly curved, a proud sprig that had never been bent to the string. The warrior could feel the compact power in the dense yew, a resonance both hard and pliant like good steel.

The bow staff seemed to be made of two strips of wood, the one light, the other dark. Mordred knew the two were one, an embrace of Black and White like the symbol of the ancient Aes Sedai. It had been carved from the living heart of a tree, where heartwood met sapwood in the yew's trunk. The bow's back was white, shading to a warm honey finish. The bow's belly that would face the archer when he drew was as dark as his dreams of Nadin's Gap.

The dark heartwood of the bow's belly was rigid, unyielding, the soul of a man's pride that thought it _sei'mosiev_ to conform to the string. The light-coloured sapwood was pliant, willowy. The _da'covale_ 's formless obeisance, demanded of those who serve.

Mordred's heart beat hard as he grounded the stave, his keen young eyes distant as it took in his enemy, gathered, waiting for them – for him – a half-mile distant. A small force, but resolute. He was nervous. No, afraid. This was the day his entire life had been preparation for.

 _Are you ready?_

Mordred took up a bow-cord, callused fingers as deliberate and delicate as a master musician stringing a cittern as he tied a loop-knot that he hooked over the notched horn cap of the bow's lower limb. He grounded the stave.

 _You will know the time, yourself. When you have the strength._

With greater familiarity, the Emperor fashioned another choking noose in the string. Seized the stave in his right hand, gritting his teeth against the effort as he forced the bow into compliance, sweat chilly under his shirt as the bowstaff fought his efforts to string it, as if it were a living thing. An Ogier sapling. Yet it was his, Mordred knew it. A weapon made for his hand alone. _You will grow to be a strong man,_ his father had told him. And this rude stave was strong, too, as he was, the more so for its short, compact length.

Arms trembling with the effort, Mordred finally succeeded in looping the knot over the nock crowning the bow's upper limb. The bow snapped back against the string angrily like a gaffed pike, wrenching a basso note from the rough bow cord of whipped yarn, stiffened with horse-hoof glue.

Mordred straightened, holding out his left hand for a prompt, discreet _sul'dam_ to lay an arrow in his palm. Without acknowledging his Property, the archer read the arrow, admiring its construction, a perfect example of the fletcher's craft, fledged with crisp-edged white goose feathers.

The Emperor nocked the arrow. A bowman drew with the first two fingers. A familiar voice in his ear. _Don't snatch at the string. Pluck it._ His draw was smooth, clean, even as the draw-weight ratcheted up, to the full draw, arrow fletchings nestling briefly against his cheeks.

Mordred paused, held in place by some instinct, a perfection of form and intent.

The wind dropped, the Paendrag hawk on the standard arrested mid-flight. Then the land rang under a great stroke, a pealing note that was everywhere at once. Light blazed and men cowered, pressing their faces to the ground in affright. All except Mordred, who slowly turned to face the cataclysm, arrow still upon the string.

He alone saw the Sun refract, doubling and doubling again in the sky, a hypersphere of suns passing through this Mirror of the Wheel, leaving their celestial imprint, until their brightness was too much to bear.

Mordred screamed. Unable to look away.

The bow shattered like glass in his hand, the bowcord scoring his face with a bloody weal, laying open his cheek, slashing against the leather bracer upon his forearm.

Mordred – who would not kneel – was knelt, gentled by the Light that cast him upon his face. He lay there, panting like a hare in the grass when a hawk circles above, until the brilliance passed from this world, before he dared look up once more.

Guilt assailed him, a weregild of blood and shame. He welcomed it. It was better than the numbness that had enslaved him. Better than the bitter pear of Chalinda Cour's ripe body in a loveless bed. Better than the obeisance of fear he saw in the eyes of those who served him.

His dark advocate had departed from him, leaving him alone.

Mordred's bloody palm, scored by the bowstring's lash, grasped something with rude strength. A single feather, black and tacky with his blood. Not the goose feather of an arrow-flight. By some alchemy, it was the wing-feather of an albatross, a shard of glossy jet.

 _Aven'kal._ His destiny still claimed him, though now he wanted it not.


	75. Chapter 75: Cheap At The Price

**Chapter 75: A Peaceable Man**

Beca Koukal schooled her countenance to the impassivity expected from a general of the Ever-Victorious Army. Arms folded behind her back, fingers interlaced, her posture nonetheless held a brittle hardness, an edge like knapped flint.

It was a time for pragmatism, despite the anger and self-loathing that curdled in her breast. She turned to her trumpeter, proud of how assured her voice sounded, crisp and measured.

"The Banner will withdraw in good order by the column" Beca Surehand decreed, "said withdrawal supported by our _raken_ detachment. Use the remaining Dragon's Eggs to effect our disengagement."

Surehand did not trouble to issue instructions to the light infantry or musket companies. Their experienced centenars and ventenars were amongst her best officers, selected for their tactical flexibility and independence, the ability to implement their own decisions.

Her trained eye took in the devastation, assimilated the reports from her battlefield captains. All were in agreement. They had suffered unsustainable losses.

The Winged Hammer had incurred its first defeat.

As anticipated, her elite combined-arms division had inflicted heavy initial casualties upon the defenders of the bothy. Her massed columns of infantry had been successful in breaching the perimeter, overrunning the dry-stone wall and pushing back the resolute defenders by sheer momentum, despite the desperate valour and superior skill at arms of the Aiel.

Yet, with victory tantalisingly close at hand, the enemy had rallied. Evidently, the fort's defenders had found and deactivated the Guardian _ter'angreal_ , and their channellers had led a ferocious counter-assault upon her Seanchan forces.

Reports indicated a doughty band of _Asha'man_ and a lone Aiel _Tsorov'ande Doon_ had accounted for two of her three detachments of men-at-arms between them. Ironically, her early success with the Guardian had proved their undoing, the armoured columns impetuously pressing forward into the heart of the enemy, outstripping the protection of the _damane_. Their densely-packed formations proved an irresistible target, vulnerable to assault by the One Power.

Her reach had exceeded her grasp.

She had lost over two thousand men. It was little consolation that the enemy had likely lost just as many, or even that military doctrine told her the besiegers needed a three-to-one edge in numbers to prevail. The deployment of the Guardian _ter'angreal_ by the Last Orphan and her _raken_ should have given her all the edge she needed.

Beca Koukal was bereft. But she knew her duty to the Empire and to the soldiers under her command. _Save what could be saved._ A measured withdrawal now, before a punishing defeat became a rout that inflicted terminal damage upon her Winged Hammer, the corps that she had served in for the better part of fifteen years, as she rose from the ranks of the Fists of Heaven to a Banner-General's rod of command.

Everybody lost battles. Even the Dragon Reborn. The Ever-Victorious Army suffered the occasional defeat, assimilated the lessons that needed to be learned, returned to the battlefield and prevailed. You learned more from a smarting defeat than from a procession of easy victories.

 _Defeat is a privilege,_ Beca told herself. _It is not personal._

The hell it wasn't personal! Today, she had doubtless lost friends, comrades in arms that she had fought alongside. Men and women who trusted her and looked up to her. Looked for her to lead them. To see them safe home to their families.

She straightened her spine. As long as a single one of the soldiers under her charge remained to her, it fell upon her to shoulder that responsibility. She had been chosen because – for all her flaws – she had been deemed fittest to lead. Until she was relieved of her command, that sacred trust belonged to her, and to none other.

The worst thing she could possibly do now was to freeze. To allow guilt and shame to overwhelm her to the point where she was unable to act for fear that she would be sending her soldiers to their deaths.

Even the right decisions cost lives.

The Banner-General plastered an encouraging smile upon her face. "Steady, my lads!" she barked to the soldiers within earshot. "Stick together. Don't run! I'm proud of you. The Emperor, Light love him, is proud of you!"

* * *

Mat observed Beca Koukal dispassionately through a pinhole Gateway, as she rallied her flagging troops. He had instructed Bode to open a Gateway the size of a wedding-band that focused upon the enemy General's face.

Mat was an unseen watcher in the dark. Hearing her words as she spoke them. Reading her expression for tells, stood face-to-face with his adversary, as if they contested a _sha'je_ duel. Knifepoints in the dark. Under different circumstances, he could have admired the young commander's resolve. You learned a lot about a leader's character in adversity.

His heart was _cuendillar._ This woman had been part of the assault upon Tuon. Party to her stilling. Her life was the price.

Under different circumstances, his admiration would have compassed the Seanchan soldiery who had taken such a battering and remained resilient.

His heart was _cuendillar._ These men and women had followed Tuon to Malkier. Prosecuted an undeclared war on the peaceful nation of Malkier, and upon the Aiel, defenders of the Dragon's Peace. _Light burn my soul,_ Mat swore, _I am a peaceable man. I don't start fights. But by the Light, I finish them!_

His gaze took in the swiftly-moving columns of Seanchan soldiery without pity. They were enemy ordinance. Weapons that must be decommissioned. If he let them go unmolested, they would rally. Return to fight him, to continue their unjust war of oppression. It would be but false compassion. The Consolidation War had taught him that.

They were swords, sharp and unslaked, that must be beaten into ploughshares. Or into scrap iron.

Bode was at his elbow. She read the bleakness in his expression. The Yellow Sister understood what he intended without words.

"Mat, don't." she pled. "Call Lan off."

Her brother's face was resigned. "I do what I must."

Bodewhin Cauthon's horrified gaze encompassed the battlefield carnage, unable to look away. Bearing witness. "Even murder?" Her accusation a Two Rivers blackthorn, drawing his heart's blood.

Mat didn't argue with her assessment. "Even that." _It's all murder,_ Mat's heart told him. _Creator forgive me, but it is._

They crested the rise, framed by the rising sun at their back, turning dawn's promise into bleak trepidation in Seanchan hearts. The Malkier host filled the horizon, a foaming wave rearing up with the dread of its onset, men and horses overspilling the long escarpment.

* * *

They came on with a sure slowness, a winter forest of bare lance points scraping raw the Northland sky, cold and clear, riding knee-to-knee. The night fled at the rumour of their onset, the clouds driven back before an arctic breeze that hallowed the sky, the heavens a delicate rosechalice. Snow fell from a clear sky, falling into the wondering faces of the retreating Seanchan as they reluctantly turned at bay to confront the iron horsemen of Malkier.

The Northmen dressed their lines by the company, grimly purposeful as they loosened swords in their sheathes, fussed with their stirrups and saddle-girths. The minutiae that was part of their preparation, ritual and familiarity. The horses, too, scented battle, skittish mounts settled down by the gentle pressure of a rider's knees, the touch of a familiar hand.

Theirs was a host of steel, a bright vigilance of sand-and-vinegar-scoured plate, the war-gear of the Seven Lords of Malkier set to purpose.

They were not Tairens or Cairhienin to ride to war under a vaunting panoply of silks and linen, under the pennants of a hundred houses. They were a plain, serviceable sword of steel. A blade that had never broken. There were only two battle standards, carried aloft in the van, the heavy cloth snapping upon the lanyards as the wind impetuously carried them billowing forward to affright the foe. The Golden Crane of Malkier and the Banner of the Light.

 _Al Chalidholara Malkier._ For my sweet land Malkier.

The oldest oath and the truest. Lan raised his hand to close his visor, before remembering that his king's battle-helm – inset with gilded coronet – was open-faced. A King of Malkier showed his enemies his face, and encouraged his subjects. Fadebane hung at his left hip, a blade of Power-wrought steel that never needed sharpening nor polishing, as true as the day she was forged.

A long lance of turned cornel wood rested familiarly against his right shoulder. It belonged there. The lance was not a Warder's weapon, but Bukuma had trained him well, and what was taught young, a man never forgot.

The Void courted him as assiduously as he courted Nynaeve. Once, he was a man in love with Death, but no longer. He no longer sought the Mother's embrace, but if he fell, that would be well. He had lived a long life, known a great love, sired a son to carry his name. Brought restoration to the land of his birth.

Cast down a great Champion of the Shadow. Known the joy of battle. This above all.

He was a true son of Malkier.

"Dai Shan!" one of his warriors shouted out in acclamation, a call echoed by others. "Dai Shan!" Lan drained the heady wine of their praise, allowing it to fortify him, but not intoxicate. Battle was not a temperate pursuit. It was a maelstrom of aroused passions. His men would fight the better for his presence.

The Oneness would guide his sword. The things he cared for – his family, his land and the Light – would give him the strength to wield it. He was an old man, albeit one of no little skill. There was no shame in admitting it.

Lan looked to his right, at al'Akir who carried the Crane standard, his face taut with nerves. _He is not ready yet,_ Lan knew. Truly, there was no slight in the thought. His son was becoming a fine young man – one imbued with martial virtues as well as his mother's fine sensibilities, characteristics he himself lacked. Lan's own tutelage and the needs that had shaped his life had left him little time or inclination to become a gentleman. A gentle man.

Lan gave his boy a fond look. _Peace favour your sword, son._

But the likelihood was, it would not. And the truth was, al'Akir was not ready for the mantle of leadership, to lead the nation of Malkier. Not yet. So Lan must hold on a little longer, if he could, and the Creator allowed. Try and exemplify the qualities required of a king of Malkier, to provide the best example he could. The Light knew he was a better warrior than statesman. He had made more than his fair share of mistakes, learning the hard way what the role demanded of him.

Feeling the interrogation of his gaze, al'Akir turned to him. "Father?" the young man enquired. _His mother's eyes,_ Lan thought. Scared stiff, but staunchly resolved.

"I was just thinking" Lan commented. "No father ever had a better son."

Al'Akir coloured to the roots of his hair at the praise. "Any last advice?"

"Live" Lan muttered gruffly. "This above all else. Keep your mind on your enemy's sword and your own. Purge your mind of all distractions. _Especially_ that Aiel girl!"

Suddenly the young warrior found a saddle strap needed his urgent attention. At least he looked somewhat sober, Lan told himself. Young men were all fools for love, or whatever they fondly thought was love, anyway. He certainly had been, when he was Edeyn's _carneira_.

 _And for a little while, Moraine Damodred sore puzzled your heart, till you gave it over to duty,_ a traitor part of his mind rebuked him.

He had always been a fool.

His mind shaded Nynaeve. It was good to be a fool!

Lan grinned a broad grin as he turned to his left, to his bugler. "Sound the general advance. At the walk, by the company from the left" the King ordered. "Slow and steady. Let them fear our onset."

 _Oblique attack,_ Mat had described it to Lan, his long-fingered right hand demonstrating a smooth motion, like a bowyer's float drawing across a yew stave. They were still opposed by a strong contingent of Seanchan, including nearly two thousand men-at-arms on foot.

The last thing the Raven Prince or Lan wanted was for the assault to degenerate into a melee, with the Malkieri horsemen embroiled in a brawl, robbed of their mobility. The real strength of Lan's knights was in their powerful charge. If instead they assaulted by the company, in a herring-bone pattern, they would be able to deliver their powerful charge and retire piece-meal to re-equip with more lances and return to the fray.

Squalling above the retreating Seanchan column, the dark outline of _raken_ reeled. The retiring Seanchan forces were being harried in their retreat by swift-roving contingents of Maidens. Whenever the Aiel grew too emboldened in their pursuit, the _raken_ companies mobbed them from the air, dispersing them with well-aimed salvos of Dragon's Eggs, launched from slings. The explosive projectiles did not kill too many, but effectively deterred the concentration of force, preventing the rear of the Seanchan column from being overrun by the Aiel warriors.

Upon the arrival of Lan's horsemen, the _raken_ broke off their skirmishing with the Aiel, banding together in an inverted V-shape over the Seanchan column.

Lan felt his heart clench in his chest, knowing what was coming. _Raken_ armed with Dragon's Eggs were the bane of armour, the slow-moving aggregation of horses and riders a delectable target for aerial bombardment.

At the same time, the mobile Seanchan light companies withdrew in good order behind the cover afforded by the block of Seanchan men-at-arms in their crimson-lacquered armour, musket companies deploying in skirmish order against the Aiel. The enemy general was decisive, Lan saw. She knew her business.

Light, he hoped Mat knew what he was about, Lan thought apprehensively, eyeing the onrushing Seanchan _raken._ Without _raken_ support of their own, or archers to drive them off, Seanchan military doctrine favoured a low overflight, ensuring maximum accuracy and destruction from their explosive payload, not to mention the terror inspired by the dread flying reptiles.

Screeching their unclean hunger, the flying reptiles plummeted down upon them. The air was filled by the drumbeat of their wings, the otherworldly clamour of their cries. A nightmare of crowding, beating wings as they stooped upon Lan's knights, the last terror of the failing night.

Horses reared, fighting the reins, and brave men closed their eyes against the dread, and cowered against their horse's necks. Five hundred _raken_ against two thousand knights. The broken remnant that their Dragon's Eggs spared, the _raken_ would harry across the land with claw and talon.

Lan's grip upon the haft of his lance was like iron as he screamed his defiance to the skies.

"Al Chalidholara Malkier!" he bellowed. "Fear no darkness!"

The night sky ripped asunder above the war-host of Malkier as fifty Gateways opened at once, tilted upwards at a forty-five degree angle to frame the voracious _raken_ through their aperture. A Two Rivers voice – Mat's voice, harsh with tension – uttered the word of command.

"Loose!"

A storm of goose-feathered shafts ripped into the assailing _raken_ from below, the long iron-tipped arrows plunging into the vulnerable bellies of the reptiles. At a distance of a hundred yards, every single arrow found its mark, many _raken_ impaled by multiple bodkin-pointed shafts.

The iron storm was unrelenting, Two Rivers archers pouring flights of arrows into the _raken_ as fast as they could nock, draw and loose. One of the flying beasts of burden, its wing maimed by a black-feathered shaft, tumbled crazily from the sky, spilling screaming men from its back as it fell. It fell against the razor's edge of a Gateway, the mirrored surface bisecting the reptile's head from its neck in one surgical stroke.

Not a single one of the carrion birds passed through the onslaught of Two Rivers archery unscathed. What the hail of arrows had only marred, the impact with the unyielding terrain at high velocity despatched, the ground carpeted by their bodies, broken open like Autumn fruits.

A single _raken_ , two arrows jutting from its abdomen, was the only survivor, screaming its distress as it raggedly broke away in ungainly flight from the ambush, her _morat'raken_ clinging tenaciously to her back.

Lan took stock. Two Malkieri horseman had fallen, both crushed by the plummeting body of a slain _raken._ Another two were left on foot, having been thrown by their fear-maddened mounts. The rest of his men were unharmed and still able to fight. _Thank the Light._

The enemy were now within bowshot, and the _conroi_ at the far left extreme of the line were already spurring their mounts, lance-points levelled as they angled their assault upon the corner of the Seanchan formation.

At this close proximity, Lan could see his opponents were brave men, cool under pressure. They presented a uniform wall of scarlet, the front rank kneeling, long spears grounded, points angling upwards viciously to embed themselves into the bellies of a charging horse. The second rank held polearms outstretched at chest-level, another array of spear points threatening.

Lan eyed these men and their weapons with respect. They were good for more than stabbing, their lead-weighted hammer-heads and vicious hooking crow-bills brutally effective against plate armour in close combat. The third rank held their halberds at shoulder-height, standing side-on so more spear-points could threaten the onrushing horsemen.

It was a thorn-hedge of bright steel, wielded by men of resolve, fighting for their very lives. Mat was right, Lan acknowledged. No horses would willingly charge home into such a barrier. Those that made the attempt would surely die, each mounted man charging into a corridor that ended with seven Seanchan spears.

Lan's own _conroi_ – a double-strength contingent of two hundred men, superbly trained and equipped – reined up, awaiting their own turn to engage. Over half of them bore horsebows, short bows of ibex antler horn with great stopping-power, and these men began to skirmish with the Seanchan.

"Kill their musketeers," Lan directed, knowing that at the extreme range, the horsebows did not have the penetration to punch through plate. "But save some shafts for close assault." It would be a different matter at fifty yards.

The Iron Crane watched appraisingly as his men aimed high, lofting angled shots to fall behind the resolute barrier of Seanchan men-at-arms upon the lightly-equipped musketeers behind. Those men could not return fire, their aim blocked by their armoured comrades. Seanchan discipline soon afforded them a solution, however, the Seanchan men-at-arms crouching so the musketeers could respond with sporadic volley fire.

Dai Shan watched with barely-concealed impatience as his knights engaged the enemy. Soon it would be their turn, but before that, the men of the Crane Guard would suffer losses.

The lance companies at the sinister end of the line began chipping away at the Seanchan, wheeling in sudden charges like a flock of starlings. Their horsebows carved gaps into the Seanchan line, and then they exploited the superior length of their war-lances – eighteen-foot beams of ash or cornel wood, surmounted with a killing spike – to punch through their enemy's stout armour, before cantering away to re-equip with fresh lances. Then it would be the turn of the next company to charge.

Mat's analogy was inaccurate. It wasn't the smooth action of a drawknife upon a yew bowstave, but rather the chipping of a woodworker's chisel, gouging chunks of wood from a plank of soft pine.

It was time. Lan raised his voice, heeling his horse forward. "On me!" he called. "At the trot." If his company charged too early, they would be ragged, blunting the concussive force of their impact. His men knew it, too, as they should. They were an elite, and they dressed the line impeccably, riding knee to knee.

A hundred yards. The Seanchan muskets spat fire, a desultory volley. Nervous. Lan felt the whip-crack of a lead ball whickering past his head, uncomfortably close. A few men fell. "Close up!" Lan bellowed. "Steady, now!"

Fifty yards. Lan's shout was for his bowmen. "On my mark – and aim low – LOOSE!"

The crisp snapping sounds of _Shai'tan's_ harp music was answer to the Seanchan, a brisk fusillade of Malkieri horse-archery. All of his men found their mark, so far as he could judge, and at close proximity, around half their arrows had the force to penetrate the crimson plate armour, spearing cruelly into the frail human bodies within. The rest of their shafts were spent in vain, deflecting from the angled surface of the steel plate.

Lan saw a man slump forward, his head bowing upon his breast as if in sleep before he toppled, an arrow protruding from his torso.

Lan lowered his lance, spurring his horse. "CHARGE!"

As one, the iron horsemen of Malkier surged forward. A tidal wave of ruin, bright and gleaming with dread. In the rhythm of the charge, they were as one. Not man and horse, but centaur, hooves churning up mud behind them, the pounding hooves and the drumbeat of a man's own heartbeat drowning out all other sound.

Lan couched his lance, a spoke of wood as long as a weaver's beam concentrating the onrushing mass of horse and rider, the strength of his arm, into a needle's point that he directed.

He allowed instinct to guide his aim as he picked his target, a Seanchan warrior in the middle rank who had chosen to leave his visor open. The man's exposed face was as big as a dinner-plate to Lan's keen eye, an easy mark for a knight used to the quintain and the joust.

The King of Malkier struck true, sensing the texture of his foe's countenance through the lance as an artist feels the canvas through his paintbrush. A grisly impact that he felt in his arm and shoulder, rocking him backwards against the cantle of his high saddle as his lance broke apart in an explosion of dry chaff.

Lan knew the truth of the destruction he had wrought, the man's soft skull crumpling like a wren's egg under the irresistible force of the blow. The luckless Seanchan fell backwards into the press of bodies and Lan was spared the sight of what he had done to the man's face. War's paradox, that something that felt so intrinsically _right_ was often barbarous. An abomination.

Then his right hand was upon the reins, as his destrier responded to the sure touch of his hand, breaking off the engagement, wheeling easily in a clockwise circle. Some of his knights leaned back over the saddle to pepper the Seanchan men-at-arms with a second volley of arrows as they cantered away.

Lan had no bow. Instead his general's eye assessed the damage his men had inflicted upon the jasper-garbed enemy. _Two more passes,_ he thought. _Two more, and they will break._

He hoped they would break, anyway, and he would offer them quarter at that point, whatever Cauthon said to the contrary.


	76. Chapter 76: Winter Warrior

**Chapter 76: Cheap at the Price**

Daved Mhor used his sword to lever himself to his knees, digging the point into the ground. Unsteadily, the dark-garbed man made his feet, swaying, hunched over his sword like a doddering old man. His left arm hung useless by his side, bones shattered. The pain a paean of torment that twisted his mouth into a feral grimace, the rictus of a smile. His mouth was chalky-dry.

 _This is what dying feels like._

The six women watched him dispassionately. Waiting like buzzards for the breath to leave his body. They had learned caution at his hands. He had accounted for three _damane_ with the Power, and two with the sword. They had thought him finished when he burned himself out fighting them. Come too close, within reach of his blade.

He had disabused them of that notion. _Nothing more dangerous than a man already dead._

Dead or not, he was the last _Asha'man_ standing. He would already have joined his fallen comrades, except that he was the beneficiary of a foxhead medallion, a _ter'angreal_ that protected its bearer from channelling.

Deadly weaves wicked from him, the flows melting away as they touched his skin. But he was far from unharmed. The flames that consumed his clothing seared his flesh. The Seanchan witches had learned from their repeated attempts to kill him. The weaves themselves could not harm him, so they cast a detritus of rubble and Earth at him with gusts of Air, slamming his body repeatedly into the unyielding stone of the bothy's peel tower.

They had broken his bones, shed his blood, branded his skin with their flames. But they had not broken his spirit.

They had fought hard, he and his men. Done the _M'Hael_ proud. Defeated or not, the _Asha'man_ had shown the Seanchan that the Guardians were not to be trifled with. They had proved the efficacy of their training.

The Battle Guild of the _Asha'man_ did not produce Healers, sophists or scholars. It was a proving-ground for men. Their training was every bit as exacting as the war-craft of the _damane._ Better, in fact. His forty had slain two score of the enemy channellers before being overwhelmed.

A hollow, excoriating laugh passed his lips, little more than a sigh. Blood ran in a rivulet from his mouth. "Still here" he croaked at them. "You hit …. Like girls." He spread the thumb and index finger of his left hand a bare inch apart in illustration. "Little girls."

The eldest of the _sul'dam_ favoured him with a motherly smile that made Daved Mhor's flesh crawl. This one was the worst of them all, the _Asha'man_ remembered, seeing again the cruel ways she had put his brothers to death. Her weaves imbued with vicious intent. Clearly this woman was the leader amongst the _sul'dam._

Her voice dripped contempt. "Lay down your .. sword, _tsorov'ande doon,_ and I will spare your life. I will take you to Ebou Dar as _da'covale_ , an intriguing gift for the Emperor Mordred. May he live ten thousand years."

Daved Mhor's eye met those of the woman's _damane_ , her head chastely bowed forward. A woman owned by fear. To his surprise, she dared raise her eyes a fraction to meet his. There was a wordless plea in them as she shook her head vehemently. _Don't even think about it. It is a fate worse than death._ The Leashed One's unspoken plea.

The _Asha'man_ offered the _damane_ a compassionate smile, ere he turned upon the Leash Holder, forcing a bitter, biting raillery into his words as he drew himself up to his full height.

"I cannot do as you ask, enslaver. I _am_ the sword. I will _never_ lay it down."

The words exhausted Daved Mhor and he let his head slump upon his chest, let the long sword he bore carry his weight. _Just for a moment_. _Gather my strength._

Footsteps drawing nigh roused the _Asha'man_. With an effort, he raised his head. An absurd sight. Two naked men, with wooden swords, _shinai,_ in their hands advancing upon him. Their work-hardened musculature and the silvery marks of honourably-gained wounds upon their torsos told Daved Mhor what they were, even if their deliberate gait had not. Swordsmen. Warriors.

"As you will not come peaceably" the _sul'dam_ 's slurring voice brightly informed him, "my _da'covale_ will bring you to heel. These are the Unveiled. Gladiators, Warder-bonded to my _damane_. Last chance, boy. Lay down that sword."

Daved Mhor did not waste his breath responding, emptying his mind. He let the form choose itself. _Heron Wading in the Rushes._ He had the strength for one blow. Maybe. This way, his blade would find flesh, though he die for it.

There was grudging respect upon the purposeful faces of the Unveiled. Their movements leonine, sure.

Daved Mhor prepared himself to Sheath the Sword. One last time.

There was an ear-splitting explosion, punctuated by a grisly cry. A ghastly, inhuman scream, like a mare being slaughtered.

A flame-haired _cadin'sor_ clad figure leapt in, interposing the bulwark of his body between Daved Mhor and the Unveiled, landing lightly in a deep fighting crouch. His face veiled by a black _shoufa_ , his hands were clad in light, and he turned, gamine, to the shocked _Asha'man,_ amusement percolating through his voice. "I think I will have the honour of this dance, Daved Mhor. You look like you need a moment to catch your breath!"

 _Janduin._

At that moment, one of the Unveiled sought to take advantage of the Aiel's distraction. He fell upon the Aiel with tigerish ferocity, blade blurring in Blacklance's Last Strike, aimed at the Stone Dog's back.

Moving swifter than Daved Mhor would have believed possible, Janduin twisted, spinning under the wooden blade, long leg scything out, reaping the Unveiled's lead leg from under him.

There were twin spears of blinding light in his hands, but the Aiel youngling did not choose to use them, exploding upwards like a pheasant from cover, a rising knee strike that caught the _da'covale_ warrior flush upon the chin, hurling him from his feet, unconscious.

The other Unveiled, seeing his comrade fall so easily, proved more circumspect, closing with Janduin. A tall black man, his movement liquid, the wooden _shinai_ seemed an extension of the man's will.

 _Blademaster,_ Daved Mhor understood instantly, fearing for his bold companion.

Janduin was far faster than the Unveiled, fighting with a coruscating fury, his twin spears of Fire trailing an afterimage as they blurred the air in constant motion. The blademaster met the young man's onslaught with serene harmony, the ebony outline of the _shinai_ somehow always perfectly juxtaposed to turn the Aiel's questing spears aside.

The two warriors, having taken each other's measure, by some unspoken consent took a backwards pace.

"Naked man" Janduin addressed his foe. "you dance the spears well. It has been my honour."

"Aiel," the Unveiled responded, "today you wake."

There was battle-joy in Janduin's eyes. _Fool,_ Daved Mhor cursed his too-brave companion. _Can you not see he is too much for you? Burn him from the Pattern with the One Power, as you did those Light-accursed sul'dam!_ Yet he saw the Stone Dog would not. Could not. _A captive of honour_.

Janduin surged forward, his right-hand spear flashing from his hand, a hurled thunderbolt that the Unveiled swayed away from even as the Stone Dog closed, spear angled upwards for the blademaster's throat.

The _shinai_ wove an eldritch spell, pommel deflecting the spear point, edge of the blade striking the young man's elbow with numbing force, the spear of Fire disappearing from the young man's hand as he spun away, extending his left-hand spear to deter the elderly warrior from pursuing him.

The Unveiled was too experienced to press, sword moving up into the high line, _Moon Rises Over the Lakes,_ menacing his young adversary.

Daved Mhor knew the sword. Well enough to understand that Janduin was outmatched, outsmarted. The deadly old man might be using a wooden practice blade, but in a blademaster's hands, the _shinai_ could kill. The greatest swordsman of all time, Jearom _Gaidin_ ,had perfected fighting with a wooden blade, carved from a boatman's punt pole.

The Aiel circled. The master's sword point tracked him, never deviating from the perfect line by as much as an inch. None of Janduin's fancy footwork or feints foxed him for an instant.

Janduin was going to die. There was nothing surer. _Never come between a fool and his folly,_ Daved's mother had told him, long ago. If the young Aiel warrior wished to throw his life away out of hubris, what was that to him?

 _He saved your life,_ Daved's conscience told him, in brusque reply. _He saved all our lives, deactivating the Guardian, too._

 _Bajad drovja!_ Daved cursed his own sense of honour as he staggered forward towards the sleek blademaster. "Hey!" he growled his challenge as he came. "Face me, or I'll stab you in the back!"

The Unveiled, sinuous and sure, rounded upon him, and Daved Mhor faced him along the length of his hardwood sword. The Seanchan shook his head, dismissing him. "You're no swordsman. I've watched you stand. No good."

"Then this should be a short fight" Daved Mhor responded. He watched the master's eyes. His peripheral vision taking in Janduin closing in from the other side. _A fair fight_ , Daved Mhor reckoned. The two of them against him.

Janduin leapt in, spears rasping from the Unveiled's sword. _Thistledown Floats on the Whirlwind_ drove him back a body's length, even as Daved Mhor surged forward.

The Seanchan moved with the vicious swiftness of an ermine, binding and deflecting the _Asha'man's_ sword with a wristy parry, tight enough that the point described a circle the size of a woman's wedding band. Daved read the move that would kill him too late. _Silverpike Takes a Swan,_ the tip of the wooden blade drifting towards the hollow of his throat with agonizing lack of haste, a blow that would crush his Adam's apple, compress his carotid artery.

The blow never landed. Instead the naked warrior slumped forward in death, the point of a spear of Fire briefly protruding from the Unveiled's chest before Janduin ripped it free. Daved Mhor had time to register Janduin's face, taut with concentration and concern.

 _Well, that's all right, then,_ Daved Mhor thought, as the world swam, an opiate blackness the feather bed that caught him as he fell.

* * *

Silent tears streaming down her cheeks, the young _marath'damane_ shouldered past a startled Tuon, who spun round in injured outrage in the doorway. _How dare she? That filthy .. Does she not know who I am?_

 _Just another marath'damane,_ Tuon's conscience answered her. _No more and no less._

 _Just like her._

The former Empress, flushing, took a moment to regain her serenity, taking refuge in the Oneness as she smoothed her green silks. Her glance followed Bodewhin Cauthon as she fled, the sound of her weeping now clearly audible, now she thought herself far from Mat's hearing. Tuon sighed heavily, turning a questioning gaze upon a discomforted Knotai.

The implicit accusation clearly rankled, as Mat's face wine-darkened. "Tuon, I didn't _do_ anything…"

There was a wisdom in saying nothing. Tuon exercised it.

Mat threw up his hands, rising to his feet to furiously sweep the table clean of its contents with an intemperate swipe of his arm, sending an inkwell rattling away, strewing the floor with maps, plans and charts. "Should have bloody expected no less" he snarled between gritted teeth. "Flaming women _always_ stick together, even when they can't stand the sight of each other!"

Icy, Tuon turned her back upon Mat. If he chose not to speak of whatever grieved him, choosing instead to vent his choler upon her instead, she would remove herself until such time as he could comport himself like a gentleman. Or failing that, a rational human being!

She slammed the door behind her, hard enough to crack the plaster.

The sound of Bode's weeping drew Tuon, curious. Two Rivers folk were very free with their emotions. It never ceased to surprise her. The _excess_ of it!

Mat's sister was seated in the corridor, her back against the wall, head in her hands, sobbing as if her heart would break. Her artless tears nonplussed Tuon, disarmed her somehow.

"Here." Tuon offered Bode a clean silk handkerchief. That was what one did for upset people, was it not? Bode spared Tuon a piteous glance, before snatching the proffered handkerchief from her hand, and resumed her crying into it. Clearly, more was required of her.

Tuon sat down beside Bode, smoothing her skirts, draping a comradely arm over Bode's slumped shoulders. "Here, here" she said, gruffly channelling Mat. He was the one that was good at this touchy-feely stuff. Not her.

Bode snorted sudden laughter. Tuon was completely at a loss. The Yellow Sister turned a tear-stained face upon Tuon, a dazed half-smile breaking through the tears. "Did the Empress of Seanchan just 'here, here' me?" Mat's sister asked of Tuon in a too-innocent voice.

Not for the first time, Tuon questioned her sanity for marrying into the Cauthon family. "Former empress," she corrected her gently. "And yes. I believe I did, at that."

"You even did his voice" Bode chuckled. "'Here, here', indeed!"

"I am quite sure I did not" Tuon offered warmly, colouring to the roots of her hair. "I would _die_ rather than sound like that… sheephead. Woolhead. Whatever!"

That did it. Bode howled with laughter, and suddenly Tuon was giggling too. Mat stuck his head out the door, to see the reason for the commotion. Both Bode and Tuon were incapable of speech, pointing mutely at Mat, in a drunken paroxysm of mirth.

Mat pulled his hat down tight above his ears, like a Sea Folk Cargomaster battening down the hatches, and retreated back the way he came, pursued by the gusts of their hilarity.

Bode quietened down first. "You're alright, you are. I never thought I'd say that to you, Tuon."

Then to Tuon's utter horror, she found herself weeping. _Contagious,_ she thought, _it's bloody contagious._ But she couldn't stop, once she began. All the hurts that she had parcelled up protectively like Sea Folk porcelain, safe from damage, where nobody could see. Losing her son. Being Stilled. Alcia's death…

Bode hugged her tight. "There, there" she burred, in her ridiculous accent, and Tuon let herself be comforted.

There really wasn't a lot else to say, it seemed.

Finally, it passed. She sniffed. Dried her eyes. Regained some much-needed composure.

Bode regarded her thoughtfully. "Meaning no offence, I know it can be a bit of a touchy subject amongst your folk, but… you can channel, can't you, Tuon?"

Somehow, this most delicate of subjects seemed quite mundane and accessible now. "Yes. High Lady Nynaeve has.. how do you say it? 'prenticed me. Shown me a few things." Her homespun pride in that achievement was a strange thing to her yet, a workman's pride in his craft. "She says I am quite advanced, already."

"I'm going to show you a thing" Bode told her. "You can consider it a belated wedding-gift, if you like. Just don't tell Nynaeve who showed you the how of it. It's called the Warder Bond.."

* * *

Lan had broken three lances, killing two men and injuring another, and still, improbably, the Seanchan stood their ground.

All told, there were less than five hundred men living, a tight schiltrom of spears and shields. Their existence an agony of fear, of sudden death at the point of Malkieri lances or Two Rivers arrows. Mat Cauthon using Gateways to shower the helpless men-at-arms with volleys of man-killing shafts, delivered at killing proximity, Gateways opening above them to disgorge their hellish hail.

As a warrior, Lan respected their choice. Their dedication to duty. As the King of Malkier, his own path lay clear. Unless and until these men laid down their arms, he would keep killing them, an automaton of steel and implacable will that overmatched their resolve. It was good to honour your enemies, and to lay them in the ground.

He chose another lance with the same particular attention he had given when the battle was still in the balance, passing over two cedar-wood spears that felt unwieldy, settling upon a solid shaft of oak surmounted by a grim mailed fist. A tournament lance. They had run out of war-spears.

Other men looked to their secondary weapons now, flanged maces, morning-stars and cleaver-bladed falchions. Head-heavy, clubbing weapons designed to be used from the saddle in the press of close-quarters combat.

"This time, we close with them!" Lan growled, loosening Fadebane in her scabbard, rolling his shoulders to ease the lance-ache from them. There were no war-cries at this. Just the tension of huntsmen, bringing a dangerous beast to bay.

To Lan's surprise, the jasper-clad enemy ranks parted, making way. A small figure advanced towards where he stood, a bare short-sword resting upon his shoulder, a Rodholder's baton held tight in his left hand. A Malkieri thegn raised a horsebow with grim purpose, intending to feather the shoulder-padded, richly-brocaded Banner-General's green coat with an arrow's flights.

"Hold!" Lan commanded. "I'll have the ears of any man who looses a shaft!"

As the slight figure approached, Lan saw that it was no man, but a young woman, with a brisk and competent mien. Her broken nose offset green eyes that regarded the world with a feline curiosity. A swordswoman, or Lan was a feather-dancer! A woman with the look of eagles.

Lan stepped forward to meet her in the dead ground, gently brushing off his son's concern, the staying hand upon his shoulder. Right hand upon the hilt of Fadebane he bowed to her, a king's bow, a slight inclination of the head.

The Banner-General saluted him, fist to heart. One warrior to another. Her voice was amused, regretful. "I have the honour to be Beca Surehand, Banner-General in the Ever-Victorious Army, by the grace of the Light."

It was good to find a foe who acknowledged the proper forms. "And I am al'Lan Mandragoran, King of Malkier, by the Light's grace. My compliments upon your defence, Banner-General Koukal. Your soldiers are to be commended for their courage.

I therefore entreat you to lay down your arms in all honour and civility. I give you my word that their lives shall be spared. Your wounded will be treated alongside our own. Your warriors will be fed whilst they are in our custody, and may return to their homes once they have sworn an oath under the Light never again to bear arms against Malkier and the Aiel nation, as long as they shall live."

Beca nodded. "That seems well, Crane Lord. All men know your word is a bond of iron, not lightly given. Yet I sense you leave something unspoken."

Lan regarded the woman warrior gravely. "Yes. Your own life must be forfeit. As a Great Captain of the Armies of the Raven Empire, you are held to be a signatory party to the Dragon's Peace, which you and your Emperor violated in prosecuting an unjust war against my people Malkier, and the very defenders of the Dragon's Peace, the Aiel."

Beca shrugged, for the first time awkward under the broad epaulets of a General's mantle, essaying a light laugh. "That's it? That's all?"

Lan only nodded. Waiting.

"I hardly think any true soldier would balk at such a bargain" Beca began, raising an eyebrow. "So be it, Lan King. My life for theirs. And cheap at the price."

Lan stepped forward, hand settling upon his sword hilt in decision, so they spoke face-to-face, words for the two of them alone to share. "Now?" Lan asked. "Here?"

The Banner-General only shrugged. "I'm not over-anxious to quit this life, _Aan'allein._ But I'm but a small player upon the stage, and I know my cues. Leave 'em wanting more, that's what they always say. This is as good a place as any, I suppose. In sight of my men. Upon ground hallowed by their blood."

Lan smiled, water in the desert. "It has been my honour, Banner-General. Do you have any personal effects, possessions, you wish to pass on?"

Beca gurned. "Not really. Me and my money were soon parted. I spent some on wine and pretty young men. The rest, I merely squandered."

Her gaze took in her men for the last time. "They're my legacy, I suppose. I gave 'em everything I had that was worth having. I don't regret a bloody minute of it."

The force of her will fell upon Lan as she turned her malachite gaze upon his. "See that you keep your word, Man Alone. Look after my men, or my shade will never let you rest."

Lan eased his sword in his sheath, a discreet movement of his wrist.

Beca's countenance turned pert. Wilful. "Yes. Enough talk. Let's do this thing, before I lose my nerve and shame us all. Strike clean, and strike true."

Lan squared his shoulders, planting his feet a careful shoulder-width apart.

"May the last embrace of the Mother welcome you home, Beca Koukal."

The warrior King waited for her nod.

Blacklance's Last Strike was exquisite, the blade finding the space between her ribs cleanly to puncture her heart. Blood bloomed, darkening the heavy green fabric of the Banner General's coat as she sagged against Lan, who caught her by the shoulders.

Her eyes opened, fabulously wild, released of care.

"Beautiful" she whispered, as Lan lowered her carefully to the ground.

Lan used the pristine white of his surcoat to clean his blade. The Golden Crane of Malker, now serene in flight above a lake of blood. His practised movements imbued with careless grace, the old man performed Folding the Fan, the long blade of Fadebane slipping home in its scabbard.

The Iron Crane took off his helm, looking down upon his fallen foe in brief meditation. Then he turned and walked away without a backward glance.


	77. Chapter 77: House Of The Hawk

**Chapter 77: Winter Warrior**

"Sire!" A man's voice, reedy with age, roused Lan from his reverie.

Frowning, Lan turned towards his white-haired housecarle. "Emrin. I thought my orders were explicit. Stay at your post. Guard the Queen. What brings you here?"

There was a measure of stiff-necked reproach in his aged retainer's voice. "Sire! It was the Lady Nynaeve herself as sent me here, to you. You'll want to hear this, al'Lan King."

The intensity of Lan's gaze caused Emrin to take an involuntary backwards step, as he lowered his voice. "Sire, the Queen… The child is coming. But there have been … complications." A pained expression furrowed the walnut countenance of the housecarle. "The Lady wishes you to come to her, ere the end. She's dying, Lord!"

With a terrible, mirthless laugh that chilled Emrin's heart, Lan vaulted into the saddle of his black gelding, setting spurs to its side. Emrin's words had accomplished what no enemy ever had before, causing the King of Malkier to flee the field of battle.

Blinking in consternation, Emrin watched the Battle Lord ride away. His heart was heavy within him, his mind overburdened, weary with woe. But he had done his duty, he knew that. Carried his message. The woman with the honey-blond tresses of hair and the rosebud mouth would be pleased with him.

A thought that warmed his old bones like a nip of brandy on a midwinter's night. Palsied him with horror like a Fade's gaze.

Why then did his heart accuse him? Oh dear, sweet Light, what had he done, and why?

Emrin fell to his knees in the soil of his Malkier. Buried his face against the Mother's breast in dismay. No longer a brisk old man, a winter warrior of the Crane Guard. Something beyond his ken had overthrown both mind and heart. Torn from him the strength of a rude old age and the honour of a lifetime of service.

A withered, liver-spotted hand scrabbled for the hilt of his sword, intending to throw himself upon its blade. Expunge the dishonour he felt.

 _No._ A voice, great with authority, stayed his hand.

 _What, then?_ Emrin asked, faded blue eyes filled with an agony of awe.

 _You live, do you not?_ The voice demanded of him, a young man's voice. A tone that would have instigated a hundred duels, sharp and sure. _Or do you sleep?_

The vestige of his downtrodden honour pricked, Emrin raised his head. There was a waspish umbrage in his reply, whoever addressed him so, if it be the Creator Himself. _Ay. I yet draw breath. What of it?_

 _Good._ The voice seemed well-pleased at an old man's cantankerousness. _Then fight._

 _How?_ Emrin thought to ask.

There was no reply. Emrin had expected none, he realised. Because he knew his duty. What he needed to do. Deliberately, the winter warrior stood, knees protesting at the effort.

 _I am a warrior of the Crane Guard. I belong at my post._

But the King of Malkier was long gone, the solitary _Asha'man_ riding with the Crane Lord opening a Gateway to the Seven Towers. It was a two-hour ride on a good horse. No. He could not stand at the King's side. He was already too late.

But he could give an accounting to the King's son, who led the Malkieri host in the King's absence. Face whatever punishment al'Akir deemed fitting. Emrin understood now what had been done to him, as its residual effects fell from him. _Compulsion._

The honey-haired woman had been a Dreadlord of the Shadow.

 _The Light damn all witches!_

* * *

The steel-garbed Winter Guardsmen in their winged helms who moved to intercept the tall, grim figure stepped aside respectfully, grounding their halberds when they recognised their King. Lan tore past them, all but running, their presence barely impinging on his consciousness, right hand grounded upon the hilt of Fadebane by instinct.

In a long life, Lan could count upon the digits of one hand the number of times he had been terrified, and have fingers to spare. _Terrified._ Not merely afraid. All men knew fear. Fear was a wise man's ally. It kept a warrior sharp, grounded in the moment.

Terror was a vise about his heart, manacles of iron about his wrists.

 _Powerless. I am powerless._

His heart hammering in his breast.

Lan drew up, his eyes seeing without understanding, boots slipping upon the slick marble as he checked his wild rush. He was in the private chambers he shared with Nynaeve, a comfortable cheery hearthside reminiscent of the Winespring Inn in Emond's Field.

Nynaeve was seated upon one of the chairs, to all appearances hale, and still very much pregnant. Her eyes flashed with a captive's helpless anger. An anger directed at the woman who sat beside her, a dainty porcelain doll of a woman in Ebou Dari silks, whose long honey-blond hair was arrayed in hundreds of fine braids.

A second glance revealed her ageless Aes Sedai face, a girlish countenance frozen forever into _cuendillar_ hardness. Spiteful. Domineering. The stylised lightning panels upon her dress, the silver bracelet upon her wrist. _Sul'dam._ The woman he had taken for a servant, crouching like a spavined dog at her feet with a matching silver leash around her neck. _Damane._

Lan's blood ran cold. _Liandrin._

A man Lan had initially taken for a servant, crouching by the fireside, turning over the ashes of the fire with a poker completed the tableau, standing slowly, with the lazy assurance of a roused blacklance, sunning itself. A dangerous man, Lan knew instantly, marking the delicacy of his movements as he relinquished the poker, the lightness of his step betraying what he was just as surely as the eye-baffling cloak that cowled him. A Warder.

With the of-a-sudden motion from absolute stillness that made Lan so dangerous, Fadebane cleared its scabbard as Lan pounced like a ridgecat, sword flashing towards Liandrin's heart in _Blacklance's Last Strike._ The _sul'dam_ was the most dangerous person in the room.

Liandrin merely extended a slender, manicured hand in Lan's direction. He had time to feel the foxhead medallion he wore freeze against his chest as the _ter'angreal_ protected him from whatever web the Dreadlord cast at him.

Lan watched Liandrin's lazy assurance replaced by the starkness of fear before the woman's Warder ploughed into him with the force of a falling pine. The man hadn't attempted to draw the extra-long broadsword he bore, understanding he didn't have time.

 _Well trained,_ Lan assessed him. _Unpredictable._

Instead he had launched himself bodily at Lan, leading with the point of his elbow. Lan twisted away from the blow, mid-air, seeking to roll clear, as the thickset Warder landed on him like a hod of bricks.

Lan lost his grip upon Fadebane, which rolled clattering away over the smooth stone flags of the floor, striking sparks, as the renegade swordsman wrapped brawny legs around Lan's waist, pinning his lower body as he attempted to crush Lan's windpipe with the blade of his right forearm, bringing the full weight of his body to bear. _Light, the man was strong!_ Choking. Suffocating.

Lan's left arm grabbed the Warder's forearm, even as he locked his legs around the other man's torso, elevating his own hips off the ground, relieving some of the pressure that had him gasping for air.

Bringing all his athleticism to bear, Lan pulled the burly Warder into his embrace, looping his right arm around the other man's neck, even as he pushed his rival's forearm aside with his left arm, completing the triangle choke with his left arm, left hand clasping his right wrist, applying constricting pressure on his foe's neck.

Rotating his hips, the King wrestled the Warder, forcing him face down, the triangle chokehold locked tight about the Seanchan agent's throat with decisive finality like the coils of a serpent. Another moment, and this dangerous adversary would be unconscious or dead.

A terrific blow upon Lan's back hurled him across the room. Liandrin had used the Power to pick up a stout wooden chair, and dash it to pieces against his body. The blow threw him in the opposite direction to his sword.

Lan rolled, scooping up a jagged piece of wood from the broken chair as he regained his feet, grasping the short shard of ash in his clenched right fist, held low like an Ebou Dari bravo. _Everything is a weapon._

His enemy gained his feet a heartbeat later, and made his first mistake, going for his sword. Lan leapt at him, going with a downwards left elbow-strike aimed at the crown of his head, his right hand following up, blurring in a destruction, plunging his makeshift dagger into the elbow of the Warder's sword arm, dragging it free, severing tendons.

The Warder shook off the blow to his temple, coming back at Lan with a vicious head-butt, the crude blow dropping Lan like a stone. Lan rolled clear, half-dazed, made his feet, before Liandrin used the Power to rip the rug out from under his feet, and Lan, on his hands and knees, was helpless as the Warder grabbed his swordsman's braid, slamming a knee into his face. Lan was unconscious before his body hit the ground.

* * *

Lilen had never lost the habit of listening round corners. _Listen not through a keyhole, lest you be vexed._ It was a bad habit, she knew, one her father had sought to cure her of, but one she held to. How else to know the true character of those you were supposed to place your trust in?

Nynaeve seemed kind enough, a queen's polish overlaying a countrywoman's practicality. Her foster-mother had a warm temper, and a hot heart. She had always been kind to Lilen, thus far – though Lilen caught her sometimes looking at her askance from time to time, as if she was a jigsaw puzzle that Rand had given her. A gift and an enigma, wrapped in one. But she wasn't. She was just a girl.

Wasn't she?

Lilen was good at reading people. Despite the outward semblance of civility, and the hushed voices, Nynaeve and the woman with the honey-coloured hair despised one another.

Best to stay hid, in the shadows. Let the grown-ups talk, and see what she could learn. Lilen was intrigued. There was another woman, too, but she seemed of little account. Liandrin's servant? And a tall man. He carried a brooding air of incipient violence. A damaged man. He stood apart from the scene, as if he was there for another purpose entirely.

Lilen was wise. She stayed hid.

The wisdom of her course was proved. Her foster-father had returned and there had been a terrible fight! Her father was a strong man, but the big stranger had proved stronger. It had not been a fair fight, however. The honey-haired woman had glowed like the sun. She had.. done things. Cheated. Lilen could almost see what Liandrin had done.

The fight had finished with her foster father beaten senseless, lying on his back on the floor. Bleeding. Liandrin was smug, now. Satisfied, like a cat with a saucer of milk. Nynaeve was crying silently. Furious. Helpless. Liandrin mocking her, but Lilen couldn't make out the words.

Liandrin had taken something from Lan. A medallion on a leather thong. She was spinning it round her finger, idly.

Liandrin was cruel. Full of spite.

Lan was coming to. Groaning.

Liandrin started glowing again. She was doing something to Lan. Something awful. The armour-clad warrior stood up. His feet dragging as if he was unwilling. Picked up his sword. Walked towards Nynaeve. Tears streaming down his face.

Lilen could see Nynaeve's face, not his. Read her lips: _It's not your fault. I love you, Lan._

Lilen was angry now. Really angry. Angry enough to glow, herself! Angry enough that her fear didn't matter. But afraid enough to be cautious. She crept round the corner, still unseen, mouse-quiet. Lan was going to kill Nynaeve! But it wasn't his fault.

Lilen used her strength to shove him away from her. Strong as Lan was, with all his armour and muscles, she was stronger. Far stronger. This should have been absurd to Lilen, but it wasn't.

Another blow, a battering-ram of Lilen's will, hurled the big bully with the no-see cloak against the wall. That was the end of him!

The honey-haired woman rose from her seat, shaking with an anger that quailed Lilen's sudden effusion of courage. There was recognition in the cruel woman's face. Fear, too. " _You…!_ " she sputtered, pointing at Lilen with an arm which trembled with consternation.

Lilen realised she didn't want to hear who this woman thought she was. Was in fact more afraid of that than of anything the honey-haired woman could do to her with the Power.

Lilen was furious. An anger that burst from her heart, coursing through her body into her hands. An anger she flung at the cruel woman with the sneering mouth. She felt resistance as the braided woman fought back against her wild strength, snarling with the effort.

It was no use. For all her wiles, Liandrin was weak. Her fitful struggles grew more desperate as her eyes widened with fear. The end was swift, Lilen ripping through Liandrin's defences like paper. Liandrin's eyes rolled back in her head as she fell back into her chair, senseless.

Lilen ran to her foster-mother, burying her head in her bosom, sobbing out her fear as Nynaeve held her tight.


	78. Chapter 78: Carai en Elisande

**Chapter 78: Carai en Elisande**

Al'Akir's barrel-chested stallion whickered nervously, shying away from an otherwise unremarkable plot of muddy Malkieri soil. Mat was already turning, foxhead medallion a frozen weight over his heart.

The Gateway's outline snapped into being, resolving into a steel-rimed rectangle. It trembled, lower edge refusing to marry with the ground, flexing uncomfortably about its diagonal axis, flashing silver, then black, resolving into a striated stormcloud grey.

Mat backed away warily as the Gateway trembled, fraying edges gleaming razor-edge fibres, lowering his _ashanderai_ , screaming for _Asha'man_. This was none of his channellers' making – or should not be – they had designated Travelling-grounds!

Al'Akir was already slipping out of the saddle, edging side-on to the door's aperture, sword held low. _Dai Shan_ 's sontrusted in steel. Dismounted Malkieri armsmen fanned out, surrounding the portal. You didn't want to be on horseback when the One Power was being used as a weapon.

The Gateway resolved with a declamatory thunder-peal that froze them all in place. Mat's traitor heart leapt with joy before being wrenched with unease and dread when he saw Tuon standing on the other side of the portal, her face set and hard – assumed Aes Sedai serenity holding by a hair, overlaid upon a tension that compressed her mouth in a determined line.

Mat rushed forward, interposing his body between Tuon and the agitated Borderlanders, who looked very much of a mind to strike first and ask questions later. It was the only chance you had against a Dreadlord. "Hold!" he was shouting, voice rough with fear, spreading his arms wide. "It's Tuon! Put up your swords!"

Tuon stepped through, apparently oblivious to the consternation she had occasioned, her determined stride taking her into the protective shadow of Mat's body. The slight inclination of a raised eyebrow as nuanced a statement as the language of fans, informing Mat in no uncertain terms not to crowd her. Sensible, he yielded a pace, and she followed. Steps in a dance. _Daes Dae'mar._

Blessedly, the unstable Gateway slammed shut behind her without further incident. The Raven Prince shuddered at the thought. If the Gateway had collapsed instead, the resultant explosion would likely have destroyed everything within a half-mile, killing them all. Killing her. Mat did not know which eventuality was worse.

 _Dismounted. Horse killed under him. Trolloc corpses carpeting the ground, he stood atop a hillock of broken bodies. Trollocs, men and slaughtered horseflesh. A dark-garbed Fade lay face down at the foot of the pile. "Los Valdar Cuebiyari!" he bellowed, panting with the effort._ Forward the Heart Guard _._

 _But his heavy catapharacti, horse and man armoured in lamellar scale, would fight no more, until the Wheel turned. To a man, they had fallen under the Red Eagle, a lance shattered against the breastplate of the enemy._

 _There were crimson-armoured men amongst the dead, carved down one by one by Trolloc cleavers and falchions. First, men and horses hewn down by pike and halberd, snatched from saddles by Trolloc catchpoles, and then the final, desperate defence of men afoot, a rude shield-ring encircled by a sea of foes, hacking and hewing. Laying about them. Now he stood alone._

 _He wielded the battle standard in his last defence, breaking the lanyards to make a serviceable weapon of it, leaving only the stave's crosstrees, snaring the cloth of Manetheren's banner around the spear's stave. The linen cloth was sullied. Steeped in blood. His leather gauntlets were caked in it. Yet he would die ere he relinquished his grasp upon it._

 _Carai en Caldazar! For the Red Eagle._

 _The black banner of Ba'alzemon incited him to violence. The White City at his back. Manetheren. The Mountain Home. The Coronet rising high, a circlet of sword-points. He could feel her there. His spouse,_ _Eldrene ay Ellan ay Carlan._ _Fighting her own desperate battle against a score of Dreadlords, standing upon the tower top, a mighty_ sa'angreal _– The Woman's Sword – in her hands as she laid waste. Calling upon lightning that she cast upon the Shadow's hordes._

 _He could feel the need in her, the desperation, as from the vantage of the high tower, she watched his desperate mounted charge towards the Black Banner founder, stalled and choked by unnumbered foes. Watched their right flank collapse under the ceaseless pressure, the dark hordes milling, encircling, rolling them up, penning them against the western flank of the Mountain Home._

 _He had gambled and lost. A wager of the body. There was no longer time to withdraw his forces into the City._

 _It was twilight, the sun bleeding out, falling behind the keel of the Mountain Home. Night was falling for all of them._

 _This was the night his people died._

 _A Myrddraal reared up before him. 'The look of the Eyeless' is fear, men said. But the Shadow's creature recoiled before the unslaked challenge upon the face of Aemon al'Caar, twisting away from his reckless assault. A cultured riposte all but tore Aemon's helm from his head, the Thakan'dar blade screaming against the sleek steel of the King's visor._

 _The heavy, leaf-shaped boar-spear tip atop his standard skewered the Myrddraal through the throat, near-decapitating the Fade as he drove the spear through the Lurk's brain-stem with the force of his lunge. "Ai Elisande!" he screamed. The Rose Of The Sun. His wife's_ cognomen _._

 _Aemon felt her intent through the Warder-bond. Knew a terrible fear that transcended the immediacy of his own desperate struggle. "No…." he breathed, heedless of the clutching Trolloc hands, the hulking man-beasts closing in upon him from every side. His wife's sending was brief and poignant. A farewell._

 _Aemon planted the butt of the spear in the ground, and closed his eyes. The last thing Aemon al'Caar wanted to see in this world was Elisande's face. A spear slammed into his backplate, a pig-snouted Trolloc driving the blade through his armour with inhuman strength._

" _Elisande" al'Caar breathed, and never spoke more._

 _He felt Elisande swept away by a tsunami of_ saidar _as she surrendered herself utterly to the Power. An oceanic torrent that consumed her. She blazed brighter, aurific until only Light remained. A vengeance of Light. Until she was no more._

 _A second sun dawned over the plains of Manetheren, a sun that rose in the West and fell to earth, bringing ruin and wrath, a hammer blow knapping the flinty flank of the Mountain Home._

 _The White City, transported into light, a celestial city, was made perfect in the white fire that annihilated her. Aemon knew a vicious exultation, knowing her sacrifice – their sacrifice – had been sufficient to scour away the Shadow. Then came a mighty wind, and Aemon al'Caar, last King of Manetheren, knew no more._

 _After the wind, silence._

Shaking, Mat leaned forward, pitching his voice for her alone to hear, as he grabbed her by the shoulders. "What are you about, Tuon?" he hissed. "That was a right insane thing to do! This battlefield is no place for you. Why, you're only half-trained!..."

Tuon's voice was lacquered, the smooth sleekness of a sword's scabbard. "Knotai, I trained _damane_ for many years, before you prevailed upon me to desist the practice. I wore the bracelet. I daresay I know as much as any Novice or Apprentice of the White Tower. I will make do. _Sarabat shaiqen nai batain pyast_."

Mat ground his teeth. It was not the same thing, as she very well knew. As her stumbling progress under Nynaeve's tuition attested to. _How many years have you actually channelled the Power, yourself, Tuon?_

 _I won't lose you again._

Her foot was tapping, vexatious as she eyed him askance. "And you have no right to ask me to walk away from this fight, Knotai. Not today. We fight for the destiny of the Raven Empire itself. My place is here. Beside you. Like Queen Elisande of Manetheren."

Mat shivered, despite himself. _A goose walked over my grave._

"This would be Nynaeve's doing!" Mat exclaimed in horror and grief, hardly knowing what he said. Hardly knowing _who_ said it. "Well, you can get that idea right out of your head, Tuon. Elisande _died._ I felt it." The Warder Bond hung between them, unspoken. Mat beat his fist against his chest. "Right here! Only for a moment. Before.." _Before I died._ "And I don't want to feel anything like that. Ever again!"

Light, though, she was beautiful, face tilted up to his quizzically. A circlet of silver bound her brow, matching the silver collar she wore proudly, her neck bare, displaying it to the world. A stylized representation of the _a'dam._ Mat knew it was not the real thing. The near presence of another _ter'angreal_ would have made his skin itch when he wore the foxhead medallion.

Tuon's voice was hushed. The reverence of handling a heirloom. Porcelain, precious and ancient. "So it is true" she breathed. "All those lives. How can you even bear it?"

Abruptly, she frowned. "I can feel it. You thinking of her." Tuon's fist tapped his chest. Not gently. " _I_ am your wife, Maitrim Cauthon. All the wife you can handle. All the wife that is good for you!" A sudden, squalling sea-change in her emotions. _Contrite? Tuon, contrite?_ Her hand, gentle upon his wrist. "I am sorry for your loss, Aemon al'Caar al'Thorin."

Tuon was swathed in blue silks. The blue of the Aryth Ocean. The blue of mourning. Whoever won today, many Seanchan lives would be lost.

Tears of pearl upon her sleeves, but her eyes were dry.

Mat laughed softly. "Yonder is an army of your – our – countrymen. Thousands of them. Here we stand, the two of us, at the head of an army of Aiel and Borderlanders." He shook his head at the wonder of it. "Ever think we maybe have the wrong of it, Tuon?"

"Being right," Tuon stated, "is not a matter of how many plead your cause. Even if it were but you and I alone, we would be duty-bound to stand, and let the Light decide." Suddenly impish, she reached up to tug at the brim of Mat's hat, fondly. "As well you know." She flashed a coy smile of rare warmth. "Honestly, I cannot imagine why you wear that… floppy cow-pie .. on your head. It does not agree with your Banner-General's apparel."

Mat favoured her with a pained look. "That .. floppy cow-pie .. as you call it is a very fine hat, I'll have you know. Practical. This .." Mat shrugged his shoulders demonstratively in the heavily-quilted fabric of his dress coat to demonstrate "…vulgar monstrosity, on the other hand, only serves to slow me down."

"You need slowing down. You are a troublesome subject, Maitrim Cauthon!" Her laugh was smoky, at odds with her waspish tone. Intimate. "You look rather fetching, though. Almost.." Tuon dragged the word "..dashing. In the right light."

"'Almost dashing?' _Heh_. You forget I can feel your emotions through our bond. You were all but swooning!" _Whoever would have thought an Aes Sedai leash would feel so fine?_ "Speaking of which, that confection you are wearing, while it has an undeniable .. charm .. is not the most practical apparel for a battlefield…"

Tuon's look was arch, teasing her lower lip with her teeth. "I daresay you are trying to find some way to talk me clean out of my dress! Well, I'm wise to your horse-trading Two-Rivers wiles!"

Mat grinned sunnily. "We'll see about that. Afterwards." He extended his arm for her to take. _Good to see the lessons in deportment are paying off, after a mere twenty years,_ Tuon thought, wryly, interlinking elbows gracefully. "Shall we have a look at the enemy?" Mat suggested, waving airily towards the van of their army.

Mat and Tuon were unprepared for the clamour that greeted their procession, from stern-faced Malkieri armsmen and Shienaran lancers. Even from the _cadin'sor_ -clad ranks of the Aiel who made way for them.

"Raven Prince!"

"Gambler!"

"Son of Battles!" This from a sandy-haired Aiel Maiden, with _shoufa_ and the black-and white teardrop headscarf of a _siswai'aman._

 _This is for Min Farshaw. For Alcia the so'feia._ Mat thought, sudden anger filling him as he looked out upon the Seanchan host, the densely-packed battles of armoured men, the prowling beasts of prey. Upon the Hawkwing banner, stolen from its rightful owner. _For Tuon._ Upon the martial woman with the lightning-empanelled coats numbering in their thousands. _For every woman forced into a collar._

What filled Mat's heart with joy and relief, however, was the acclamation reserved for Fortuona. There was genuine warmth for the former Empress, whose proud bearing and unruffled demeanour was flushed by unfeigned pleasure.

Tuon looked neither to the right nor the left. Her eyes raked the enemy ranks instead, her expression darkening when it alighted upon the Seanchan battle standard. Demanding satisfaction.

Mat had feared they would see her as a protagonist of this bloody conflict, as much to blame as the aggressor Mordred. Tuon's grip tightened appreciably upon Mat's arm. Much of the praise came from female channellers – a scattering of Aes Sedai and Kin, and Wise Ones – though their words were taken up by others, who bracketed their progress, an informal guard of honour. The more so, when they saw the silver collar, bright and defiant around her throat.

"Daughter of the Nine Moons!"

"Battle Queen!" This from the Borderlanders, who well remembered the field of Merrilor.

"Daughter of the Hawk!"

"Paendrag!"

 _Carai en Elisande._ Mat's silent tribute.

Three gigantic armoured battles matched the thin line of his Aiel across the centre of the pass. _Lopar_ in the broken ground to his right, across the foaming river. The hulking shapes of hundreds of _grolm_ addressing Mat's left, where he was weakest, forcing Lan's knights to commit to unequal battle.

Surmounting the ridge, Mat's resolute forces still held the bothy after a desperate night's fighting against the Winged Hammer, a redoubt that checked Seanchan aggression, encircled by a turma of swift-moving Seanchan light horse – horse-archers and lancers.

Opposing them, Faile Bashere's Saldeans – horribly outnumbered, but swift-moving light armour that should keep the Seanchan riders off them for a while. A thin crescent of steel, brave upon the ridgeline. A concave shield protecting his army's wing.

Behind the Aiel, the rear of his position was consolidated by a wagon laager, manned by Two Rivers archers and elements of the Band crossbow corps. Stone-faced, the Two Rivers elite – Perrin Aybara and his one hundred armoured Wolf Guard with sword and bow – eyed the _lopar_ across the birling river, a churning deluge that was a truer shield than the tiny contingent of men-at-arms that opposed them. On the other flank, a thousand Borderland men-at-arms afoot. All he had. It was desperate. All but hopeless.

Yet, there was a boldness, a confident impetuosity in his tiny army, and as the Raven Prince looked out upon the enemy, he saw only fear, expressed in the tight, conservative groupings of the enemy formations. He wasn't much for omens, but they had all witnessed it. The storm of suns. And there was no doubt in Mat's mind that they stood in the Light.

The dice birled in his head, the rattling drumroll presaging the advance, a wildness to equal the Last Hunt seizing him. They _would_ prevail. For all their numbers, the apprehensive enemy would not stand against them.

He would not wait for them!

The dice stopped. Mat took a deep breath, readying himself. Lowered his spear. "Forward!" the Raven Prince snarled, feeling Tuon's strength ignite as she wrested hold of life-giving, life-taking _saidar._ Empress and Warder went forward in lockstep _._ "For the Light and glory!"


	79. Chapter 79: The Lay Of The Seven Suns

**Chapter 79: The Lay of The Seven Suns**

Of the Field of the Seven Suns, in the Eighteenth year of the Fourth Age. Composed by Taringail ap Merrilyn Trakand, Court-Bard to Queen Ishara, by the Grace of the Light, Queen of Andor and Cairhien, Protector of Murandy and Altara.

 _When the Daughter of Nine Moons walked 'neath seven suns_

 _And Caar's son Aemon took up the glaive once more_

 _Acquaintance old renewed, made brash and rude_

 _Then Mordred brought the brooding West to war._

* * *

 _Ten thousand score from Ebou Dar_

 _From Imfaral beyond the Aryth's shore_

 _From land's brink and world's end_

 _Sun-ripe Khoweal and Anangore_

 _Where sun runs long o'er horseman's plains_

 _They all came at the Raven's call._

* * *

 _Wind-scoured sky pinked lees of wine_

 _As night marched through Death's door_

 _Uthair's shame ne'r lowered their gaze_

 _When Surehand slept on Night's long shore._

 _The men of the West stood all amazed_

 _Brief kissed the snow from rose-stained sky_

 _For Koukal's blood slaked Dai Shan's blade_

 _Stung many a wondering, wounded eye._

 _A lone black feather fell. Her watch stayed,_

 _The Winged Banner, overthrown._

 _Malkier knows their names_

 _Gave last embrace. Her bosom final home._

 _When kin fought kin. Sire and mother against son –_

 _The Paendrag, Dark-pledged, self-enslaved._

* * *

 _This hard land wept a night forlorn_

 _At Nain's Peel, Aiel and Asha'man_

 _In wrath held high ground, ere the dawn._

 _Till Dreadbane came. Aan'allein,_

' _Neath golden crane and crown, al'Lan –_

 _Sword-thegn, Light-sworn – clove home._

* * *

 _The Steward came from the high land_

 _The Mountain Home, by blood sworn._

 _As days long past, at Tarwin's Gap,_

 _The long bow and the black thorn,_

 _Rained grim steel hail. Men fell, rent_

 _Blood leached away at life's bourn._

 _The Red Eagle and the Wolfshead stood,_

 _The Wolf King, thick-thewed, old yet fain_

 _Made Mah'alleinir weighty, a just rood_

 _Bestrewing ground with broken men._

 _Bold Faile Bashere in Saldea's van,_

 _Lance-skill whet keen in pent spite_

 _Ten thousand spears to the man_

 _Bright iron cold ice-rimed in morn light_

 _Each the foe to overthrow_

 _Strove 'gainst Seanchan valour on the height_

 _Where death reached down, bestrode the dawn_

 _Whilst earth groaned, clove. Forked lightning bright._

* * *

 _They are gone down, now_

 _Swords shattered, shields shivered_

 _Gone down into the long years_

 _Wind-lost arrow-flights quiver_

 _Laid down into that hallowed ground_

 _By Cauthon's son, the grief-giver –_

 _The Raven's pride did lay them down_

 _And of their souls, the Light deliver._


	80. Chapter 80: Are You Men?

**Chapter 80: Are You Men?**

 _Mad_ , Mordred Paendrag thought, savagely. _Mad as a March hare._

Incredulous, he watched the impetuous onset of his father's tiny army. A wave, spending the last of its strength at the high-tide line. Aiel at the centre, dark-veiled, soft-booted feet thrumming the ground as they loped, outstripping the supporting heavy cavalry of Malkier on their left flank.

Mandragoran was no fool, advancing slowly, methodically, at the canter, preparatory to a sudden, savage charge that would impact upon his lines at the same time as the Aiel.

His own forces slowly marched to meet them, armour-clad men struggling through clinging clay mud, wading like fishing herons through water that rose to knee-height in places, laborious movements exaggerated, stilted, as they fought for balance. Strength-sapping. It was discomforting, a hindrance, but no more. His men had been through worse. Try fighting upon farm-land tilled for winter wheat! Furrows deep enough to bury a man to the waist, loose black soil broken open into a clutching morass.

 _You will not stop me, Father._

 _Slowly, slowly,_ Mordred urged, willing his men to arrive to confront the enemy in a cohesive body, and his officers, captains and centenars obeyed his direction. He had divided the main body of his infantry into three columns, learning from the partial success Surehand had enjoyed with the tactic at Nain's Peel. The deep banners of armoured men possessed the momentum to sunder the lightly-armed ranks of their Aiel adversaries, steel wedges he intended to drive into the enemy formation.

The young warrior watched their composed advance, the tall sons of Anangore and Seandar, pale-faced men of martial stamp, the progeny of Hawkwing's corsairs who had landed upon Seanchan's eastern margins from their boxy caravels, a forest of triangular black sails that hemmed the sunrise horizon.

These were haughty men of that lineage, resplendent in lamellar scale armour that had not changed overmuch since the Paendrag's day, hauberks of bright steel coin. Hard men. Men who paid the iron price.

Their conical helmets nodded, billed with steel like a crane's beak, hawk-winged helms that flared behind to protect the back of their necks. Their gauntleted fists held cruel arms for close-quarters battle. Falcon-beaks and short-hafted war lances. Lead-weighted maces. Two-handed falchions and back-curved rhomphoia, cleaving weapons designed to hook behind an enemy's shield. To bite through armour into yielding flesh, with the ease of a fisherman shelling clams.

Behind his men-at-arms marshalled Mordred's light infantry, garishly caprisoned in lacquered ebony and bamboo armour, each man equipped with a short stabbing sword, oval buckler and two throwing spears. Tough men, sinewy as greyhounds, trained to within an inch of their lives. Real soldiers who earned their pay. _The best fighting men in the world._

The Emperor had arrayed them in a deep rectangle whose length overmatched that of his enemy's entire battle line. He intended his heavy infantry to punch through the Aiel lines, like an awl through tough leather, and the disciplined light infantry to engage and destroy the fragmented enemy piecemeal, in detail.

The fleet-footed Aiel had swiftly closed to twice bowshot, their long-limbed strides eating up the intervening distance easily. They came on in silence, dun-coloured as a mob of sparrows.

Mordred frowned as he contrasted the fluidity of their onset to the laborious toil of his own soldiers, belatedly realising that the battlefield was not flat, as he had supposed. His opponents held the upper ground, a dry plateau a foot higher than the clay bog his warriors slogged across.

Mordred's mouth twisted into a smile that was half sneer, acknowledging the minor victory the Raven Prince had gained by the deception. The cost incurred by his troops in effort and lives struggling through the mire and fighting uphill into Aiel spears, would not be insignificant.

Mordred knew all the stories. His father was a gambler. A tavern scrapper. He was brilliant at dragging his opponents into the kind of gutter brawl at which he excelled. With the indefatigable and adaptable Aiel at his disposal, he had the wherewithal to make this a very bloody and costly confrontation.

 _What of it?_ Mordred thought, bullish. He was prepared to pay the butcher's bill.

The Seanchan Emperor cast his gaze at his squads of _sul'dam_ and _damane_ as they hiked up their skirts, wading after the armoured columns they supported. Mordred had sent a few hundred forward to bolster his advance. A sufficiency. Enough to commit the enemy channellers to battle, leaving the balance of his own _marath'damane_ free to avail themselves of any weakness that the renegade army left exposed as the battle progressed.

 _Al Chalidholara Malkier!_

With a great shout, five thousand war lances dropped from the parade rest as Mandragoran's heavy cavalry spurred their mounts into the charge.

 _Too early,_ Mordred assessed. _Way too early_. For all the Borderlander's vaunted discipline, the massed charge would be ragged by the time it fell upon the right flank of his own army.

Mordred's precise mind calculated, seeking an advantage in their sudden onset, finding none. The Malkieri cavalry would engage his _grolm_ before the Aiel irregulars met his heavy infantry. But heavy horse could not stand against the ferocity of the carnivorous fighting beasts. Even if the horses could be pressed into the suicidal charge, it would be fruitless. Like assailing a castle wall. Lances would break uselessly against a _grolm's_ iron hide, a few hundredweight of armoured man and horse colliding with a couple of tons of prime war-beast.

All the assault would achieve was to enrage the _grolm_ into a blood-frenzy. Their counter-assault would shatter the Malkieri, leaving the Aiel left flank exquisitely vulnerable to a trampling, rampaging slaughter.

Mordred felt a spasm of what might have been pity. The Malkieri armsmen were an anachronism, for all their bravery. The Wheel had turned. The world moved on.

Still, the last charge of the Malkieri made a brave sight, Mordred thought. They rode knee-to-knee, a synchronicity of sand-scoured, vinegar-bright Northern steel, huge horses clad in chamfrons of barded steel, men daring the gates of Shayol Ghul, heads lowered intently as each man leaned forward over the arch of their steed's neck.

Each man in the first line couched a lance, levelling the threat of serried spear-points upon the enemy they intended to ride down into destruction. They spurred through a desultory hail of crossbow bolts, a brief squall that left the squadrons of mounted men unscathed.

Mordred's lips moved as he assessed the distance between the onrushing host and his own. _One hundred yards. Fifty._ So close, a wondering Mordred thought, that he almost felt he could reach out and touch them. He fancied he could see Mandragoran himself, _Dai Shan_ at the centre of the first line, distinguishing him by his coronet and the Golden Crane upon his tabard.

Abruptly, unexpectedly, the Borderland cavalry reined up, drawing to a halt a bare dozen yards in front of his waiting _grolm._ The front rank dressed their line as if on parade, presenting an unbroken thicket of barbed steel threatening the opposing foe.

Meanwhile, the bright percussive plucking notes of horse-bows sounded, Malkieri warriors firing from the saddle, raking the Seanchan light infantry with harassing fire, emptying their quivers as fast as they could nock and loose. A provocation, an insect's bite.

Mordred was nonplussed. _What was this? Grolm_ were quicker than horses, particularly over short distances. There was no way the Malkier horse would be able to safely disengage once the _grolm_ charged them.

Mordred gave the signal to his Captain of Armour, a decisive, chopping movement of his left hand. _Sweep them from the field._

The crouching, hulking preponderance of the _grolm_ – scaled limbs dense with musculature, craggy shoulders squat and powerful, like the roots of a tree – surged forward with an appalling vigour, taloned limbs scrabbling deep into the clay, chitinous hooves churning, bitter ivory tusks lowered to gouge, bronze beaks agape to gore and gape. They were the redress Mordred sought for the temerity of the Raven Prince's assault, for the imprudent challenge of Malkier's knights.

Sudden explosions amongst the rampaging herd of _grolm_. Wild expostulations of wrath that fountained earth, turned charging _grolm_ into smoking hunks of meat, into charred fire-blackened carcases.

 _This was not the One Power_ , Mordred recognised instantly from the booming signature sound of the explosions, as he desperately tried to belay his orders, to recall the advance. _Dragon's Eggs, thrown from the saddle._

On a cerebral level, Mordred understood the rationale, watching the Malkieri lances wheel away, an orderly withdrawal, even as his mind raged with inchoate anger. The Borderlanders drew up safely at a vantage, protecting Mat's left wing from envelopment. At a stroke, they had redressed the advantage of armour and speed he had once held.

 _Come, test us_ , the Golden Crane incited, the wind setting the standard aflutter.

And Mordred would oblige. In time, he could encircle the enemy left with his infantry legions, his _damane,_ bringing the weight of numbers to bear, until the mounted foe were forced to commit to the melee.

In due course, once he had driven the obstinate Saldeans from the heights, he could match the Malkieri with his own armour, harassing the flanks and rear with his Shon Klear lancers, superlative light horsemen with a powerful charge. The mathematics of time and numbers were inexorable, all but ensuring that in due course, this game little army that had the temerity to oppose him would be beaten to its knees and subjugated.

 _Come, test us_ , the Golden Crane defied him, dauntless. _Are you men?_


	81. Chapter 81: Warm Work

**Chapter 81: Warm Work**

They were silk-wrapped steel. Silent emissaries of death from afar.

Bak Ju Mong was five years old, as his nation accounted it. Five years since he earned the thumb-ring of manhood, a worn circlet of _s'redit_ ivory to protect the archer's skin from the silk of the bowcord. His people dwelt in the frozen tundra far to the north of Imfaral, ancestral lands they had inhabited for generations before the Hawk Men came.

His people, the Goong Sul, cared little for the Hawk Men and their endless wars of conquest and dominance. They were the People of the Arrow. They had found accommodation with Luthair Paendrag, providing him with horse soldiers for his armies. Every second son from every family. In return, his folk took a tribute from the wealth the opulent Southlands had to offer, and in horseflesh – the true currency and lifeblood of his race.

Sometimes, elements among the Hawkwing's descendants attempted to renegotiate the compact Luthair had struck, invading the Northlands. Slow-moving columns comprising soldiers on foot and sluggish armoured men upon horseback. Strange reptilian beasts that flew or walked the land.

The cold-blooded lizard-creatures did not do well in these intemperate climes. Their thin blood froze, they sickened and they died. And the men that came dunged the ground with their corpses, watered its soils with their blood. But there could be peace, when the Hawk Men remembered wisdom. And with peace came prosperity, measured in horses, silks and bright steel weapons.

Once, the elders told, in a time long ago, the Goong Sul had not lived in tents under the sapphire glory of a star-strewn sky. A long time ago, they had dwelt in a city of stone, where the light of a hundred thousand fires had blanketed the night sky with a dulling smoke that occluded the lucent constellations. Under the shadow of tall towers of black stone that rivalled the icy peaks of the North March in height.

They had made their bed in sin, the sin of the Stone Men, the sin of the Hawk Men. Avarice. They blotted out the Light itself with the banked darkness of their forge fires, and sought in the bowels of the Earth for gold and precious stones. And finally, the Creator tired of their profane ways, and abandoned them to the Darkness they so craved.

The ground itself turned hungry for the lives of men. Their delving had awakened dark ghouls – the _Deaina –_ from those cold, subterranean grottoes where they had been shackled and bound. Creatures taking the form of a woman, that could steal a man's soul with their cries. Many perished.

A remnant of the Goong Sul fled north, and some that made that perilous journey were fain to press on further, running west then south until they were sundered from their kin, falling out of recollection. Some held that these had returned to their evil misdeeds and were lost. _A dog returns to its vomit._ But his people had remained on the plains. A hard way of life, and many died, but those that lived were vitiated, throve. Grew strong and hale. A free man's life.

Bak Ju Mong heeled his blood mare – no true horseman needed spurs – and the slight chestnut surged forward at the gallop, running light-foot and easy. The warrior raised his composite reflex bow – buffalo-horn belly and bamboo spine, stiffened with sinew – nocking his deadly payload to the string.

This arrow was the secret of his people's success. A simple thing, once understood, but deadly beyond belief. The arrow came in two component parts – a guide sheath the length of a conventional shaft, called a _ton gar_ , an arrow-length of bamboo cane split longitudinally, and a _pyeon jeon_ – a stubby little dart, shorter than a crossbow bolt.

The guide allowed the short arrow to be fired from the full draw. The shorter arrow – lighter and more aerodynamic – cut the air with breath-taking rapidity, allowing the archer far greater range.

Bak Ju Mong scorned the Seanchan nobles and their pretensions towards the art of archery. The People of the Arrow could fire over three hundred and fifty yards, with blazing rapidity from the saddle and great accuracy, far outmatching anything the Hawk People were capable of.

The Goong Sul was intrigued by the bowmanship of the Two Rivers archers, whose fame had carried even to the yurts of his people across the Great Sea. He doubted even they could match the range and stopping-power of his people's arrows. If the Light willed it, today he would test their legend.

But first, they must dispose of a different foe. Heavily-armoured men on ponderous steel-skirted horses. They were few in number. So few it was almost insulting. A thin tulwar of steel. They were not complete fools, though, skulking just behind the crest of the rise, avoiding framing themselves against the skyline, presenting an easy target for his arrows. And a considerable number of the iron men had bows – outranged, of course, but still a deterrent to their predation.

Bak caught a glimpse of steel – a lance-head perhaps, or the crest of a helm – as his mare traversed a long arc over the brow of the hill, and raised his bow-arm, correcting his aim instinctually. The arrow left the string with an authoritative thwack, soaring high into the air to fall upon their enemy over the crest of the hill.

His turma circled, each man in turn loosing an arrow as they came into range. They rode tantalisingly close to their foe, just outside of the enemy's arrow-range, their harassment a constant provocation. Bak had ten more of the short _pyeon jeon_ shafts, ranged killers, and twenty conventional arrows in his deep quiver. Thirty lives in his purse.

The enemy sat their horses like statues. They were disciplined, at least, refusing to be drawn into a wild chase of their elusive foe, or fruitlessly wasting arrows on the swift distant target his horseman presented.

No matter. The Goong Sul were patient. It would take as long as it took.

* * *

 _Warm work._

Faile Bashere recalled her father's words, puffing out his cheeks, his exhalation stirring his thick grey moustache as the grizzled old warrior described another close call on the battlefield, each desperate, bloody bit of business recounted with ironic humour.

Faile had loved those tales as a child, wide-eyed, hanging upon every word, though her mother had scolded her back to her studies when she caught her listening to the bloodthirsty sagas. "Zarine Bashere! And as for you, husband, you should not encourage her!" Deira ni Ghaline ti Bashere had been formidable, forcing the Great Captain, Davram Bashere, into full retreat. "Ah, Deira my dove. It does no harm…"

 _Warm work._ This was a tight spot, as tight as any her father had narrated, but Faile was far from flushed. Cold sweat beaded upon the back of her neck. There was nothing worse than being forced to sit as placidly as ducks upon a millpond whilst people took turns shooting arrows at you.

A skittish Faile resisted the urge to fidget, to fret with her reins as a sudden arrow banged against her bannerman's shield, the short thick shaft embedding itself to the flights as it punched through solid steel with an ease that was uncomfortable to witness. All too conscious of the target her unvisored face presented.

Faile watched it quiver, trying not to flinch. _Mother's milk in a cup!_

She decided to look at the banner instead, the tall _con_ standard showing three serene silver carp on an azure background. Very calming. She took a deep breath.

Twenty years ago, when she was a Hunter for the Horn, Faile might have been fool enough to enjoy this, as she courted danger! Now, she was filled with a useless, scratchy anger. The Queen of Saldea was vexed, and the greater portion of that vexation came from fighting a battle with Perrin far from her side.

Not for her own protection, no – she wouldn't wish her husband here, in harm's way, not for anything – but because Perrin was fighting elsewhere, a desperate stand alongside his liege men, the Two Rivers people he led. For once in their tempestuous marriage, there had been neither argument nor protest upon either part. Just resignation. That was his duty. Just as this was hers. And their duty separated them upon the battlefield today.

Perrin would survive, though. Of course he would! That man had fought his way through an entire Shaido army to rescue her. He was nothing less than an unstoppable force of nature. That was what the Two Rivers folk he led believed. They near-idolized him – the more so because he had grown up amongst them. A mythic figure.

She knew a different truth, a different man. Considered. Hesitant. Gentle. The plain man they had forgotten, who had set himself aside like a blacksmith's 'prentice piece to become the leader they'd all needed.

The traditional Saldean idiom recurred to her. Words a wife spoke to her husband before he rode into battle: _If you fall, I will take up your sword._ Blunt and to the point. There was no need for a Saldean – born and bred to fight the Shadow – to gloss over certain realities of life. _Light help me, you know I will, if you fall, Perrin. I swear it by my hope of salvation and rebirth! But I need you to live._

Her bannerman – a villainous-looking individual with a hatchet face – pushed up his own visor to address her. "Illumined Lady. Permission to take a fl- .. a couple of squads and secure our bl- ..our flanks."

 _Chase them, you mean,_ Faile thought sourly, glancing at the circling archers, grey-robed men mounted on fleet, nimble mounts. She shook her head shortly. "Denied. You'd be turned into pincushions." _Or surrounded and hacked to dollrags if you strayed too far. There are thousands of them out there._ "It is not yet time to bare steel. Heed me, armsman."

A Saldean never drew steel she did not intend to blood.

The bannerman said nothing to that, but his expression spoke volumes upon his behalf. An indignant epistle: _It does us no flaming good to sit on our arses here and let those spavined goat-kissers burning well shoot flaming arrows at us all the livelong day!_

Dumb insolence was what it amounted to. The man was as bad as his father! After a time, your mind helpfully supplied the choice adverbs that he resorted to, even when he didn't actually speak them himself!

"Your father? Uno? How fares he" Faile asked, coolly. _Think of anything other than the prospect of imminent death at a Seanchan arrow-point._ "Still well, I trust?"

"Never better, Lady" Bannerman Shasta averred, with a grin. "Though a man wouldn't know it for all the moaning you hear: 'Ach, my flaming back… My arthritis.. Never been the same since bloody Merrilor, and all the burning thanks I get is this flaming draughty hovel that my bone-idle son won't fettle for me in my bloody dotage! At least you could fix the roof, boy…'"

A particularly daring young rider darted in closer than his fellows, leaning low over his horse's neck to aim an arrow at Faile herself. Despite the imminent threat to her person, the Queen caught the significant nod Shasta gave to a nearby Saldean bowman who waited patiently, arrow nocked upon the string.

His single well-aimed shaft transfixed the Seanchan rider's heart. The intemperate horse-archer fell from the saddle, dragged for a few dozen yards by his stirrup, steel-grey robes smearing in the clay before his soiled body rolled free, coming to rest face down.

 _There are old soldiers, and bold soldiers. But no old, bold soldiers._

"One less of the goatsons" was Shasta's laconic commentary.

The enemy Captain, however, was not as patient a hunter as the skilled horse-archers, Faile saw. A good thing – she had lost a score of men in the last quarter-hour alone. Their only recompense the single life of that young fool who had ventured too close.

Faile watched as a red signal flare went up from Nain's Bothy: _The enemy have committed to a full assault._ Another attempt to capture the redoubt by Seanchan infantry and _damane,_ whilst the main body of the enemy cavalry swept round the bothy, intending to sweep her Saldean lances from the long ridge, spilling down upon Lan Mandragoran and the Aiel left, fanning out behind to assault Cauthon's rear. And then Perrin and the Two Rivers men – all but unarmoured on foot, in leather jerkins – would bear the brunt. _Not on my watch,_ Faile resolved. _I will die first._

 _Warm work, my little Faile, warm work._ Thousands of Shon Klear lancers. Heavy _clibinarii_ cavalry hailing from Tzura and Rampore in the Seanchan southlands, slow and ponderous in the onset, but oh sweet Light, vicious opponents in the melee battle that she could no longer avoid. They were the heaviest-armoured of all her foes, bearing flanged maces and morning-stars. Burly, brutal men mounted upon the heaviest warhorses.

 _Warm work._

Faile drew her sword. Reverently kissed the crosstrees and raised it above her head. A roar went up, the acclamation of men too-long compelled to sit idle in fear and trepidation, enduring punishment without the recourse to fight back. Lances battered against shields as her trained killers whipped themselves into a battle frenzy.

Her voice was clipped and curt. Someone who did not know Faile Bashere, did not know the temper of Saldean hearts, might have deemed it dispassionate. The Saldean host thrilled to it.

"Rank of three" she ordered. "Bows in the centre. Fish Guard, take your swords, 'ware our flanks." Faile paused. Took a deep breath, filling her lungs." ON ME…. AT THE WALK… FORWARD!"

Slowly at first, like a glacier gathering momentum, the released Saldean war host started forward. Faile placed herself under Shasta's banner, resisting the temptation to bull her horse through the press and take point in the front line. It was not her place. Something of utility she had learned from Davram's stories.

Fluid, the grey-clad horse archers parted before them as Saldea's spear levy crowned the rise with lance-points, breaking left and right to ride past her men-at-arms, loosing a torrent of arrows that banged from stout plate armour as they went.

Her Éored disdained the arrow storm, stiff-backed in the saddle even when the occasional man fell, or a horse was gored by a needling shaft. Faile rued those dismounted as gravely as those who fell wounded or slain. They would be easy prey on foot when they were distanced from her advancing cavalry.

The land opened up before her. The besieged fort, encircled, a conflagration as _damane_ and _Asha'man_ renewed warm acquaintance. Her small army poised aloft, a potential ready to sweep down from the heights and scatter her foes before her like leaves before a goodwife's broom.

And there they were, emerging from a dip in the landscape, the dead ground disgorging thousands of enemy horse with appalling swiftness. The athletic, slender frames of lancers atop horses of sixteen hands, not the destriers her own chivalry rode, but beasts bred for the chase, for speed endurance.

Light lancers, their gear and equipment pared down, minimalist. Each man bearing several lances. Their charge would be ferocious, long spears punching Faile's warriors from the saddle, before turning in flight, outstripping their vengeful pursuit. But vulnerable, if she could close with them.

Already they were angling for her flanks. Too wary and wily for her to catch. A mob of starlings flitting, impatient with winter upon them.

And finally, inching upslope towards her with a decision to match hers, Faile saw the enemy clibinarii. Not as many as she had feared. Enough, though. As many as she had.

Faile threw her sabre in the air, relishing its bitter glint in the morning sun. She snagged the tumbling blade cleanly by the hilt, snatching it from the air. "Ha!" she cried, her strident voice a lash, scornful as she gazed upon the enemy host. "Is that _it_?"

Belly-laughs from her Saldeans, as they looked upon a valley overflowing with foes.

Faile levelled her sabre with intent. "Let's go down there, and kill them all!"


	82. Chapter 82: He Who Soars

**Chapter 82: He Who Soars**

Take a wooden stake. Use a hatchet or cleaver to sharpen both ends to a rough point. Then hammer it into the ground, pointing towards the enemy. Then take your bill or your hand-axe and re-sharpen the point once again.

 _One man, one stake._ That was the archer's credo. The stake each archer's burden, dragged with him, roughening callused hands raw, spelking a man's palm with splinters. Every time the men redeployed, the same ritual: Wrest the stake from the cloying earth and lug it with you to the new location, and bed it in once more.

The archers hated the wooden poles with a passion, cursed them bloody with all a countryman's invective. The stakes were necessary, though. Without the obstacle they presented, the longbowmen were all but defenceless. Particularly against a charge by heavy cavalry. Even he could see that.

It was up to Perrin to set an example. He'd turned _Mah'alleinir_ to the rough work, and if the task did not agree with the stern soul of the Power-wrought weapon, it did the job without complaint. The steel shaft of _He Who Soars_ did not warm to the touch as it did in battle, as Perrin grasped the top of the stake in his left hand, half-hafting the war-hammer, using his good right hand to plant the tip of the stake with a few measured strokes with the flat face of the hammer-head, before standing off the embedded stake, using both hands to drive the wooden pole deeper into the dank black earth.

 _Good soil_ , Perrin judged. You could grow crops here one day, the Light willing. Winter wheat, or barley, maybe.

The Steward had learned that you did not need to say much if you led by example. Showed willing. Of course, there always those who shirked, lollygagging even from the most necessary tasks. Buies and al'Seens, who left to their own devices would let their house burn down around their ears rather than trouble themselves with the effort of putting out the blaze.

 _Steady, Perrin,_ he cautioned himself. There was a tension radiating from him that even the routine task did not abate. For once, a resentment of his own people, through no fault of their own. Up yonder, above the hilltop, Faile fought her own battle. Five long minutes ago, he had seen her lead her Saldean lancers over the ridgetop and out of sight.

It was hard to credit that ten thousand armoured men atop warhorses dressed in barded steel could look fragile, but to Perrin's eyes they had, a trickle of quicksilver upon the skyline. Then gone from view.

There were wolves out here. One pack at least within call. He resisted the temptation to ask their aid. _No. Not even for Faile._ He would not ask this of them. This was not the Last Hunt. This war was a thing of men.

He was still Young Bull – would always be Young Bull. But the world had moved on. You could no longer stand astride the chasm between humans and wolfkind, one foot planted on either side of the divide.

 _Choose._ And so he had. The world of men was mean, unthinking and cruel at times, but it had one redeeming grace. _Faile._ His wife – and his son and daughter, who were still too young to muster when the Wolfshead banner was raised. Thank the Light for its tender mercies.

Perrin still heard the wolves, felt their sorrow at his choice. _Come, Young Bull. Run with us!_ He had a different life to lead, though, and he hoped they could respect that, even if they didn't understand. For all he knew, he would join the Wolf Dream when he died, and be sundered from Faile forever when next the Wheel turned. Best make the most of his time he had with her here, then.

It had been hard for the men to leave the shelter afforded them. The safety of the wooden wagon beds at the rear of their lines, the wagon-boards facing their vulnerable rear buttressed with bags of sand to make a shoulder-height wall.

They'd followed the Aiel as they advanced, planting this thin hedge of stakes at their backs. Scant protection, in case the Seanchan managed to deploy a force behind them. But better than nothing. The men of the Two Rivers had taken their mark from Perrin, and they had done so with very little by way of complaint, the younger men taking their cue from the veterans of the field of Merrilor and Dumai's Wells.

Perrin had them divided into tent-parties – five men to a tent, with at least one veteran in each group – hoping to instil discipline from the example set by the senior mess-mates. Give each greenhorn someone experienced to look to when the arrows flew. You could see the results in the skirmish-line his Two Rivers archers took, where by unconscious choice, the men grouped instinctively in their tent-parties all along the breadth of the line.

Each man had a full quiver. Twenty shafts or more. They had no shortage of arrows, at least, even if the majority of them had been crammed into wooden casks for easy transport. Perrin loathed the custom – it crushed the fledgings – and he could only imagine what Tam al'Thor and Abell Cauthon (of blessed memory) would have made of the practice.

Tam, of course, was not dead, leastways not so far as Perrin knew. The years of violence had sat heavy upon him after he returned to the Two Rivers, and no wonder, after the field of Merrilor.

For a time, at Perrin's behest, Rand's father had employed his warlike skills, training a body of men to defend the Mountain Home with sword and bow.

Perrin had prevailed upon him, knowing the halcyon days of Two Rivers seclusion from the wider world were drawing to a close, and that either the Two Rivers would draw upon its storied heritage and take its place among the emerging nations of the Fourth Age, or its people would have no say in determining its future.

Eventually, Tam had enough. "War and death begets war and death, Perrin," the formidable old man told him, jabbing a finger for emphasis. There was _uisige_ on his breath, but his eyes were clear. Angry. "I'm done. Nothing to keep me here, boy."

To this, Perrin said nothing, though perhaps the hurt he felt had showed in his eyes, for Tam fell silent. Perrin arose slowly from his seat, took up a poker and vigorously stirred the hearth fire back to somnolent life, turning his back to his guest. Tam's voice recalled him from his reflection.

"See that you remember who you are – no matter what anyone else tries to tell you. Not even Faile." At this, Perrin would have protested, but Tam overrode him, by dint of sheer ferocity. Iron eyes framed by winter-white hair. "You're Perrin Aybara. Not the Lord Steward, not 'Goldeneyes'. _Perrin_."

"And you're drunk" Perrin informed him, bluntly.

"Aye, boy, that I am" Tam grunted. "What of it? If any man has a right, it's me." There were tears in Tam's faded eyes and suddenly, Perrin saw him as _old_. Beaten-down, shoulders slumped. Worn thin with care. _Rand,_ Perrin realised, belatedly. _The Light burn me for a blind fool. Rand never came home._

"Best you stay the night, Tam. It's cold out" Perrin told him, uncomfortably. Light, but he didn't have the words to console Tam. "Man, you're in no state to be finding your way home. I'll make up a bed for you in the spare room."

This was not a conversation to be having late of a night in any case, the both of them overwrought and tired. The low fire cast a long shadow over them both, hoary with memories. Best see how things looked in the clear light of day.

It was a mistake Perrin had cause to regret. When he awoke early to set a fire in the forge and take out the night's ashes to the spoil-heap, Tam was already gone. His bed neatly-made and squared away, as if he had never been there at all.

Just up and vanished without a word. It wasn't till Spring planting that a pedlar passing through from Baerlon brought news of him. "They say one of the heroes from the Last Battle – the father of the Dragon Reborn himself – has joined a Tinker caravan."

It was truth. That was the last time Perrin had sought the wolves' aid. They'd shown him a Sending of Tam, in the wilds of Murandy, stalking the woods with his long black bow of Andor yew, hunting game for the pot, not men. A lean figure, picking his way patiently through the foliage, barely disturbing a leaf in his passage, his Tinker's patchwork coat muted woodland shades of green and earth brown.

Tam had seen the wolves, too, of course, offering them a cautious acknowledgement, one hunter to another. Yes, Tam would be a right fine addition to any Tinker community for his poacher's skills, let alone his handiwork.

Oh, and one of the wolves, a young pup with a bald ear, had followed Tam home to his caravan, still wet-behind-the-ears enough to think himself unobserved. There'd been no malice in Bald-Ear, just curiosity, and perhaps Tam had intuited that, choosing to scare him away with an arrow that flashed perilously close to his whiskers.

Perrin grinned at that. Tam didn't miss what he aimed at.

Anyway, this wolf had seen something very interesting before he'd been set to ignominious flight. Tam was not living alone. A buxom Tinker woman with long dark hair, very fetching despite her eye-wrenching attire of saffron and vermillion, busy hanging out her washing on a line between her caravan and a neighbouring tree. Very pretty, and very pregnant.

 _Go to it, Tam,_ Perrin had thought, his heart light for the first time since Tam's absence. Tam deserved a portion of happiness, no man more.

 _I'm glad you're not here, Tam,_ Perrin thought, as Wil al'Seen – pot-bellied, with a widow's peak, his adolescent handsomeness now but a memory – planted the Wolfshead standard at the centre of their battle line, to rapturous acclaim from the men of the Two Rivers.

Perrin looked askance at the banner. He doubted he would ever get used to the standard, or what it represented – what _he_ represented – to these men. Truth to tell, it still made him uncomfortable. But if it helped stiffen their resolve – if it contributed to ensuring as many men as possible returned home to the Two Rivers and their families – he had no problem with it, or with Manetheren's _Caldazar_ being held aloft for that matter. Not any more.

They were who they were, and that was all there was to it.

Cheers rang out – Light, these men were _eager_! – and he felt himself responding, thrilling to the sounding of woodsmen's horns and the battle cries of the Two Rivers men. Sudden perspiration beaded his broad brow, his heart racing in his chest.

"Goldeneyes!"

"Lord Perrin for the Two Rivers!"

"Manetheren!"

"Carai en Caldazar!"

 _See that you remember who you are, Perrin Aybara,_ another voice warned him. _Be steadfast._


	83. Chapter 83: The Black Thorn

**Chapter 83: The Black Thorn**

Men said the Aes Sedai yoke was light. Sometimes, though, it chafed. A slave's manacle around your neck. Then a trueborn man yearned to be free, whatever the cost.

 _Mia ayende, Aes Sedai! Caballein misain ye!_

Who would trust such women? Those who dared such folly were fashioning a collar for their neck. Or a hangman's noose. He had once been one such.

 _Light annihilate you, Tetsuan the Faithless! May you burn forever!_

He could feel the woman's alien presence in his mind. Intrusive. Unwanted. An acquisitive mind, quick and agile. Self-possessed. She was a cool one, this woman who held his bond, her own fear mastered, reined in like a blood mare. That was all to the good. This was a tight spot. As dire a situation as he had ever found himself in. Worse than the Fords of Tarendrelle.

A thorn in his flesh. A rent in his spirit that would never heal. His _mashiara_ dead, and he yet living, feeling the torment through the Warder Bond in full measure. A physical representation of a psychic anguish. He was joined as with Death, his spirit commingled with her departed shade. In every living breath, every morsel of food that passed his lips, every sip of water he imbibed an agony of separation. _No._

 _Ai Eldrene a chara._ What is life without breath?

This woman's yoke kept Death at bay. He resented it. Resented her for it. The presumption that she knew the value of his life better than he himself did. This stranger, encamped in his mind like an occupying enemy.

Better to embrace Death than exist in a hale body as his spirit withered.

 _Light burn your bones to ash, woman. Can't you feel it? Let me die!_

A measure of pity in her mind as she looked in upon his nakedness. A queen's pity, a terrible thing to witness, like the Creator's. A woman weaving a tapestry, excising an errant thread for the good of the whole. Love, but not for him.

He envisaged the Warder Bond linking them as a vine, and visualised a hard winter's frost, striking it root and branch. The link went numb, unresponsive. _Better._ A spreading chill permeating through his spirit like a rime of ice across a freezing lake. _Better, yet._

There were the enemy! They made a knightly showing, stout leather haubergerons supporting their coin armour, myriad steel discs riveted together, a forge-weight of metal borne by tall men.

The Black Thorn knew them for what they were, though. The haughty sons of Al'cair'rahien'allen and Jennshain, the scions of Almoren, of the line of the Hawk. Reavers and plunderers. Men who were forever unfriends of the free nation of the Mountain Home. The standard they marched under was of black silk. Black like a corsair's sail. Black like the banner of the Shadow itself.

He visualised the charnel horror that would befall these men as they marched into the arrow-storm. Without remorse. Their chain mail no proof against blackthorn shaft and bodkin point. They would die, and leave the world a better place for their absence.

He was anger. An anger as inhospitable and bleak as the adamant face of the Mountain Home, rearing up before his enemies. A stumbling block. A stone of offense that his foes would dash themselves to pieces against in their hubris.

They would pay for bringing death and horror to his homeland!

The warrior appraised the _marath'damane_ that opposed him, a woodsman eyeing a tree he intended to fell. The enemy Dreadlords revelled in what they were. Haughty in their high-collared dresses, panelled with stylized lightning motifs. Crimson, gold and black. An affront.

Salt in his wounds.

They had committed an unpardonable offense. It was their channelling that had caused his _mashiara_ to lay down her life. For them, there could be no forgiveness, even in death.

 _Carai en Elisande!_ For the Rose of the Sun!

The enemy Captain had deployed his _damane_ behind the lines of his heavy infantry, in a supporting role. The hated channellers observed strict fire discipline. They waited for his own Aes Sedai and Wise Ones, his _Asha'man_ to strike first, revealing their positions. Their skirmish line allowed for tactical flexibility, as well as ensuring they could not be wiped out by a single powerful attack.

The General raised his hand, and his Aiel halted upon the lip of the plateau, the last pace of dry ground before the man-made mere that his enemies waded through. The Dedicated, habituated to battle, barely needed a captain's guiding hand, swiftly unlimbering bows and lacing the advancing columns of men-at-arms with brisk, efficient archery. Recurved horn bows strung with Sharan silk made a bright, incongruously lute-like note, plucked.

At one hundred and fifty paces, the black-veiled Aiel made a slaughter, raising levees of bloodied bodies in the muddy water, but the enemy were stolid, undeterred, making their measured advance even as Aiel arrows were joined by Two Rivers shafts from long range, arcing over the Aiel to fall upon their ranks.

There was an arithmetic of death at work, here, even as the relentless archery gutted the enemy columns. Men fell, men died by the score, but the stubborn enemy drew ever nearer, hunching forward into the lash of clothyard shafts like men leaning into a strong headwind, arrows banging into shields and helmets. Close enough for the general to see their tense faces under their helmets, pinched and pale, parsimonious of their life-blood.

The men of Seandar and Anangore bunched together under the squall of steel as their ranks depleted, rolling mauls of a score or more men driving forward together, covering each other as best they could with the scant provision of their tall kite shields.

The columns were implacable, transcending the fragile mortality of the men who comprised them, expendable men who fell to the side of the advancing battles, wounded and dying. Lung-shot, gut-shot. Head-shot, the price paid for wearing these antique-style visorless helms.

But the battles themselves were an unstoppable force, their armoured tread a drumbeat that drove them on. The head of the columns was flattening out, spatulate, under the withering arrow fire, but drawing ever nearer to the Aiel lines. Fifty paces now.

The General readied his _ashanderai_ , glad of the timeless familiarity the weapon afforded him. Briefly, he wished for a good horse, to take the battle to his enemies. He did his best killing from the vantage of the saddle, riding down the enemies of the Mountain Home with righteous impunity, carving a highway through his foes with the black iron he bore.

His name was Aemon al'Caar. He was two score and five years old. His enemies knew him as the Black Thorn. An obdurate warrior. A Captain without peer. And the Light have mercy on anyone who stood in his way.

The Black Thorn knew joy as he looked upon the enemy host, a tide of silver breaking upon a barren shore. Vengeance was quickening. Retribution was life. A better balm for his anguish than any witch's yoke!

 _No, you whoreson!_ a voice railed inside Aemon's mind, futile as a bluebottle battering against a windowpane. _No, damn your hide! I am Mat Cauthon! This is MY body! …_

More witch's tricks! The Black Thorn was not a man to be so easily gulled. He would take his vengeance for Elisande!

Aemon glanced to the left, reassured by the steadying presence of Borderland armour securing his flanks. One thousand Arafellin infantry, ranked eight deep, held the extremity of the line, flanked by the Malkier horse. Five thousand hardy souls, riding under the Crane and Crown. The heirs of Aramaelle had ever been steadfast allies against the Shadow. Unyielding men of constant temper and resolute mind. Men you could depend upon.

The King of Manetheren, reading the battle with his customary tactical acumen, knew this to be the moment of truth. Gave the order to unleash the Malkieri lances.

 _Los Valdar Cuebiyari! Los! Carai an Caldazar! Al Caldazar!_

There was no Heart Guard to respond to his call. Aemon knew that. He was of sound mind, as best he knew it. The world he had known had gone down unto ruin. Fallen into twilight beyond memory, night without stars. He was a man caught in a dream of another life. It mattered not.

The sun was lusty, young upon the world, the enemy marshalled against him, and that hated black banner, that tormenting black banner – the cause of all his sorrow – raged before him. That was imperative enough. He would take up arms against that obscenity one more time, until he trampled that standard into the mud, or he himself was hewn down and slain.

The day was all, and the Light it bore, his shield and succour.

Aemon's voice – cruel and fell – rose above the clear brass peal of his signaller's call. Elated with the throbbing paean of the Malkieri war-horns sounding, sonorous. This was wrath! This was ruin!

" _Muad'drin tia dar allende caba'drin rhadiem!_ "


	84. Chapter 84: A Blessing Of Water

**Chapter 84: A Blessing of Water**

Slowly, as one in a dream, Shaiel walked forward through the Aiel ranks.

They parted before her without instruction or command, perhaps feeling her _ara'i_ pressing down upon them on some subliminal level. Threatening, like the shadow of a strong man falling over your shoulder. The One Power lifted you up, set the wind under your heart and exalted it. Today, it was a weary load, _toh_ unmet and an arduous road to walk alone. A burden she stumbled under.

 _Saidar_ was water's blessing in the alkali desert. Today, Shaiel wept silently, tears pouring down her cheeks. Salt water that burned the ground it fell upon.

Aiel eyes turned to her, a tall, _cadin'sor_ -clad figure, surrounded by a multitude and yet alone. Murmuring voices wondered, awed by the portent of a Maiden's tears.

Yet Shaiel was a Maiden no more. As she walked, she cast down her weapons. First her bow of horn. Then her leather buckler. Last her long knives, each an old friend. Finally, and hardest to part with, the simple, worn blade she carried from girlhood. Aviendha's belt knife.

Shaiel left the dark _shoufa_ veil where it hung loose around her neck.

The enemy _sul'dam_ and _damane_ were aware of her now. The Seanchan channellers were not as Aiel Wise Ones. They respected strength alone, and intended to try hers like a pack of wolves. Say rather a pack of feral dogs, an _ajah_ without either the dignity or grace known to the dwellers of wild places beneath the open sky.

She felt one of the strongest take a run at her now to overthrow her – not the alpha female, no, but a young pretender. Yearning for the prestige that would come with despatching an Aiel channeller single-handed.

Shaiel raised her veil to hide a killer's face from the world.

The _sul'dam_ sought to overwhelm Shaiel with her impetuous onset, a deluge of Spirit that she intended to sweep the Dedicated away with. Had she so determined, Shaiel could have opposed strength with strength, might with might. She chose otherwise. This needed to be swift. Decisive.

Instead, Aviendha's daughter broke the _sul'dam's_ momentum, leaning a hip of Spirit into the other woman's charge like a wrestler using their opponent's weight to throw them. As the _sul'dam_ , unbalanced, sought to arrest her fall, Shaiel ungently seized her in fists of Spirit, drawing her in.

Struck out with the terrible wild talent that lay dormant within her breast, wrenching the Power from the _sul'dam,_ taking the enemy's strength for her own.

Imprisoned within her breast, a nested series of impressions, like the layers of an onion, she could feel the terror of the _sul'dam,_ an adder with her fangs drawn, and within that, the stupefaction of the _damane._ The _damane_ prisoner held little fear. Just a captive's resignation for her lot. What was one mistress, or another?

Through the women she had rendered captive, she launched a surprise attack upon the uncomprehending _sul'dam_ about her, seeking to inflict as much damage as she could before they realised the danger their former comrade presented through her.

Shaiel exulted in her redoubled strength, laying about her with a thermic spear of Fire that burned her foes from the Pattern, lancing from between the enemy _damane's_ hands to sear the flesh of the Seanchan channellers.

It was a forbidden thing to compel a _gai'shain_ to battle, yet Shaiel had dared as much and more already. The list of her transgressions was long indeed, but she intended to meet her _toh_ when this was done.

Fully.

Shaiel slew two-score or more before the rest rallied. She felt her captives die at their hands. Screamed as _damane_ fire scoured them away; first the helpless _damane,_ then the vile _sul'dam_ a heartbeat later.

She felt the link she had forged between her and the Seanchan woman snap like a bowcord, scoring her flesh. There was pain. Shaiel welcomed its lash. A down-payment upon her mortgaged honour.

Shail felt the malice as the remaining enemy _sul'dam_ turned their attention upon her in earnest. _Shai'tan's_ shadow. There would be no more duels. They would merely rip her to pieces.

The thought horrified her. Death before her _toh_ was met. Before she had even accomplished what she came to do!

Suddenly, explosions blossomed amongst the enemy channellers, dense pillars of fire and earth fountaining amongst the _sul'dam_ and _damane_ , Shaiel could not see the flows of her allies, yet clearly the onslaught was of the One Power. _Saidin._ The _Asha'man,_ taking full advantage of the damage she had dealt _._

The irresistible assault of the male channellers obliterated scores of _sul'dam_ and _damane_ where they stood _._ The earth groaned, peeling back from the wounds carved in it by the scarifying flame like blistered flesh, and even the trained Seanchan soldiery cowered under the augury of fire and might, pressing themselves against the ground in terror, deafened and blinded.

Yet the concentrated fury of the _Asha'man_ – standing in close order and savaging the enemy with a rolling ring of Earth and Fire – revealed their position at the centre of Cauthon's defence to legions of enemy _sul'dam_ and _damane_ who waited in reserve for just that moment.

Hugely outnumbered, it was all the one hundred and twenty _Asha'man_ could do to defend themselves against the Seanchan reprisal. Resolute, the black-coated men formed a close-knit shield ring, an impenetrable dome of the One Power, interlocking shields that withstood a storm of hurled Fire, lightning strikes that seared and scorched the air.

The defiance of the Guardians bought Shaiel the precious few seconds of life she needed to accomplish her task. Taking a deep breath, she drank deep from the inexhaustible well of _saidar_. Flows of Fire and Air wreathed her hands like _segade_ vines, ice-cold and slick against her palms. A numbing, white-cold fire she caressed.

The _segade_ thorns were deep inside, lacing her spirit. Shame and guilt.

 _Child, I let you burn your hand now, so that in the future, you will treat the flame with more regard. Because I must._

Ancient words, desiccated with the years. Words waiting for her blood to quicken.

Deeper and deeper Shaiel drew upon the One Power, until her ears rang, and the flows of lightning between her hands thickened to baleful, writhing serpents in her grasp.

 _To become_ da'tsang _so that the world might live. For myself, it was a price I was willing to pay a hundred-fold, and I accounted it a bargain. If that moment is yours, do not balk at the cost._

The dark bequest of the woman called Mother. A terrible old crone, known as the Cutter of Shadows.

It was time.

Shaiel knelt down upon the ground, at the margin of the man-made lake that Mat Cauthon had contrived with his artifice. A blessing of water she was about to turn into a curse. Bowed her head, the copper of her hair conducting filaments that writhed, caught up in the nimbus of her energy. She did not want to see the faces of the aghast Seanchan soldiers in their silver coin mail. Too late, they saw what she intended, though the enemy _sul'dam,_ consumed with the lust to destroy the _Asha'man,_ did not.

Shaiel thrust her hands into the water, wrist-deep, a murderer seeking to wash the blood stains from her hands. Shut her eyes against her abnegation.

Her whole body rang under the impact like a struck bell, a report that transcended sound and vision. The violent discharge of electricity picked her up, casting her inert frame back into the Aiel ranks like a thrown spear, where she struck the ground heavily, swooned, and knew no more.

* * *

Aemon al'Caar blinked, trying to clear the violet afterimage of the lightning explosion from his eyes. Even at this distance from the epicentre, every hair on his head stood upon end, and he felt his right hand convulse upon the shaft of his _ashanderai_ , a discharge of static electricity that made his nerve-endings ache. He had not felt the like since he stood under the shadow of the Mountain Home as Elisande brought it down upon the enemy.

The air was choked in a black and pestilent soot, the oily patina all that remained of dead Seanchan men. His ears rang but he could still hear the crackling of white-hot metal cooling and contracting.

He took the broad-brimmed hat from his head, as if in benediction. Looked down at the impractical apparel without recognition. Frowning, Aemon cast it aside onto the muddy ground. Scratched his head, irritated by this man's effeminate affectation of long hair.

 _First thing I'm going to do, after this is done, is shave my head._ A soldier's shorn pate was what he had become accustomed to, since boyhood. It was the mark of a noble, a man of blood. A fighting man. Long hair was for women and common-folk, not the warrior caste of Manetheren.

His considering gaze fell upon the dark-skinned woman in blue silks. His hand choked the _ashanderai_ haft a little tighter. _No. That will be the second thing I do._

 _Careful, Aemon,_ he cautioned himself, as he schooled his mind to quiet. Drew a _Gaidin's_ obscuring cloak around his lethal intent. The foxhead medallion, a reassuring weight around his neck. _Careful. Tread softly._

The smoke was clearing above the storm-blasted mere. Improbably, a handful of the enemy caught by the Aiel's lightning strike yet lived, their agonized cries, piteous as they were, drawing aid from scores of stout-hearted comrades amongst the Seanchan light infantry, who ventured into the water to drag burned and blistered men to safety, despite what they had witnessed.

The light infantry, engaged upon their mission of mercy, were well within range for the Two Rivers war-bows, if not Aiel short-bows.

Aemon hardened his heart. A practical matter. Kill them now, or kill them later. A distasteful necessity.

He turned towards his archers, and the burly fellow who commanded them. What was that man's name again? He searched Cauthon's memories, but the obdurate fellow refused him the information. Aemon didn't blame him for that. In his position, he'd likely do the same.

 _Aybara,_ Aemon remembered. The man's name was Perrin Aybara.

Aemon gestured towards the Seanchan. "Kill them, Aybara" the King of Manetheren commanded his liege subject.

* * *

Through the Warder-bond, Tuon cupped Mat's essence in her hands. Breathed life into him, fanning the spark.

As a child, she had been frightened of the dark and the terrors it held. A _so'jhin_ , couching malice behind a nurse's smiling face, had sown her dreams with tales of Myrddraal and Trollocs. So the girl she'd been then, Tuon had smuggled a glowing silk-worm into her room after lights-out, for its bathetic comforting glow in the dark.

In her ignorance, Tuon hadn't known how to feed the pupae, and inevitably, it had sickened and died in the throes of one long night.

Then, as now, Tuon cupped the failing light between her palms, willing it to live as the shadows lengthened, stole closer, the dark disclosed.

 _Stop it,_ Tuon told herself. _You are a grown woman._ _You need nobody and nothing save yourself._

The silence within derided her pretensions towards self-sufficiency.

The irony was that this hazel-eyed warrior, Aemon al'Caar, stern and strong, would have been the man her duty would have seen her choose. It was for his skills that she had drawn Maitrim Cauthon to her.

Aemon was the better match. His lineage as noble as hers, an older line than the Paendrag house, as old as the Breaking. A formal man, close-mouthed and hard. A general without equal, a natural choice as First Rodholder. A man who danced _Daes Dae'mar_ with the same deadly grace as the battlefield.

An equal.

Tuon saw his hatred for her. A mountain wolf, smiling through bared white fangs. What of it? Love was not a prerequisite for the Prince of Ravens. She could temper his violence. Forge an alliance with him, despite it. Maitrim – for all his accomplishments, the hybrid vigour of his mixed blood, was an ingraft into the old line, the old ways.

As the Seanchan accounted it, her Knotai was the lesser man. A wild card. Aemon al'Caar was the King of Cups.

Her own words rebuked her: _It does not matter how many plead your cause. Only that you are right._ Mat was what Seanchan needed, not what she wanted. Her nation had a sick soul in a hale warrior's body.

Tuon met Aemon's hostile eyes. Framed her face in civility, as if she did not see the dangerous difference lurking within him. Smiled. She was well-versed in all the arts of dissembling.

Her knife weighed heavy upon her hip as she watched the dimming light that was her Knotai's soul. If that light died, she would plunge the long and thirsty blade into Aemon al'Caar's heart. The man had been a brave warrior for the Light, and he deserved a warrior's death. But she would not suffer him to live.

But not yet.

Not until the light was extinguished. Not until this battle was done and they had the victory.


	85. Chapter 85: The Parting Glass

**Chapter 85: The Parting Glass**

"I'm sorry? Mat, you want me to _what_?"

This Aybara fellow was kindling to slow anger, Aemon saw. Tawny yellow eyes – wolf's eyes – narrowing as he regarded Aemon, who bridled at the man's tone, not to mention the temerity of the man addressing him by his given name. The _audacity_ of it. He cared for it not at all. Felt his own wildfire temper rising to match.

That would never do, however. Anger was an excess, and an excessive man made a poor leader. Aemon stepped forward, nose to nose with the other man. He was of a height with Aybara, despite the blacksmith's strong build.

"What I said, armsman, was _kill them_. The enemy. Yonder." Aemon's outstretched finger jabbed in the direction of the Seanchan struggling to help their injured comrades, but his eyes never left Perrin's. "See it done. Now."

Perrin folded his brawny arms across his chest, snorting an incredulous laugh as he shook his head. "You what? Mat, I'd rather burn first! They're not fighting us, man. Just trying to help their wounded. Leave them be, I say."

Light burn the man, but he was as stubborn-set as a plough-horse in the traces, Aemon wondered. "This is not a debate, soldier." Aemon retorted, ire colouring his cheeks.

"You're damn right it's not!" Perrin responded, implacably. "Because I'm not bloody doing it, and not a man from the Two Rivers would ever follow an order like that. Besides, where do you get off trying to order me or mine, _Lord_ Mat?" There were growls of approval from the assembled Two Rivers men who overheard the exchange. " _I'm_ the Steward of the Two Rivers. Not you. _Me!_ I never asked for it, but the Light help me, so I am."

Anger, so intense it cast a viscous, bilious red behind Aemon's eyes, framed Perrin Aybara through that crimson lens.

 _I did not stand against Ba'alzemon's Trollocs and Fades at Bekkar and the Fords of Tarendrelle, and at the last under the shield of the Mountain Home itself, to be bearded under my own banner by a baseborn churl!_

His voice was cold, issuing from between his teeth like a sword being drawn. "You low-born _hound!_ " he snarled. "I am Aemon al'Caar al'Thorin, King Under the Mountain and you will render unto me either fealty or your death!"

Perrin Aybara's eyes held Aemon's, and the world wrested between the obdurate will of the two _ta'veren._ Aybara made no move to draw _Mah'alleinir_ from the leather thong by his waist from which it hung, even though Aemon's _ashanderai_ was levelled at his heart.

"No," said Perrin finally, and his words seemed to resonate, to come from a place deeper and older than the topsoil and scrub-grass of Emond's Field that had grown over Aemon's grave. "Not I. Even if you be who you claim, I recognise no King, and render no fealty to any save the Dragon Reborn and my Creator. So strike me down if you will, because I will not raise my hand against my brother, Mat. Strike me down, Aemon – and be accursed."

Aemon hesitated, hand shaking on the shaft of his weapon. "I fought and bled and _died_ for Manetheren, to see it falter and fail, to be reduced to …. This? Sharecroppers and sheep farmers? You cannot imagine what we sacrificed. What we were. The glory and renown of it. We built a _nation_ from the ashes of the Breaking, and held it against the Armies of the Night. What are you?…"

" _Free men_." Perrin overrode him, and Aemon started. "You fought for our freedom – or have you forgotten? Not for dominion – nor to cling to a husk of life in another man's body. You were a hero, man. The greatfather of a free people.

You're right. I don't know what you endured. What it has done to you. But this lessens you. And it saddens me as it saddens us all, we Two Rivers folk who witness it. Let it go, Aemon. The Wheel has turned and you did your part. You don't need to strive any more for the faded memory of what was. Be at peace."

Aemon al'Caar took a deep breath. He felt the wrath of the roused Two Rivers men, the incipient promise of violence about him. Suddenly, he felt unutterably weary, looking into the strong surety of Aybara's amber eyes.

Then he straightened, wrath a weight no longer burdening him, stooping his shoulders. Wry now, Aemon smiled, a wan ray of sun falling over a shadowed land.

"I cry your pardon, Perrin Aybara" Aemon al'Caar offered gently. "For I see that I did you wrong. I did all of you men a great wrong."

He turned to the Two Rivers archers, encompassing them with his words. "Manetheren lives in every one of you. Men who fear no shadow, and yield only to the Light!" Just for a heartbeat, a flash of humour, sharp as Mat's, leavened Aemon's earnest face. "It seems I had forgotten much whilst I walked the Halls of the Dead. Particularly what stubborn goatsons you all are."

A few soft laughs met his words, followed by expectant silence. Not quite forgiveness, but understanding. Even compassion. "Tell me this, Aybara: Is there a place left of the Mountain Home that could call my own, even now?"

Perrin considered, harrumphing. "Well. As best I know it, the Winespring Inn. It is built upon the Kingshold. Men say the cellars are the original building, the only thing … Well the only thing that survived the wrath of the Rose of the Sun."

Aemon's eyes gleamed with unshed tears, but there was grace even in grief. "I have walked the Halls of Night and not found her shade there. It was my portion to be Bound to the Wheel, to aid Cauthon in the Great War. Elisande served in her way. I too served in mine, and of my own free will. Forgive me, that it has made of me what I am."

Perrin clapped Aemon on the shoulder. "I know. We all know some portion. None of us are the same, after. But, I think, the Pattern has done with you for an age or two at least. Light, I hope so, man." He lowered his voice, so that only the two of them could hear. "And I do hope that Elisande is waiting for you."

There was a ghost of hope in Aemon's eye. "Say you so?"

"I do."

"It has been long…

"…Long the savour." Perrin added. "Mat said that."

"Then the Light heard my words, even in the gloaming darkness whence I uttered them. So, I shall hope again." A puckish half smile curled Aemon's lip. "Aybara. What's the Winespring Inn like?"

Perrin's smile was broad. "I'm going to hazard a wild guess that you were a man who never found a deck of cards he didn't like the look of? Well, Master al'Vere turns a blind eye to such goings-on.

Mind, there's probably not … not quite as many loose women as in your days. But you won't mind too much, will you? Being a happily-married man, just as I am myself. We're downright straight-laced …" There was a gleam in the Steward's eye at that. "Well, mostly. I'll wager the brandy's better, though, nowadays. …

And when the winter's cold, there's always a chair by the hearth for weary traveller or pedlar, and where needs must, there's justice and redress seen to be done there, too. Under the Light, in the old ways."

Iron in the blacksmith's voice now, ringing strong and sure. "We're a peaceable folk, but we know there's a time for steel, yew and the black thorn and in the rafters, there is a store of swords, bows, and plenty of Two Rivers arms always willing to wield them, if need be. Because what we have is worth fighting for. What we _are_ is worth fighting for."

Aemon grinned at that. "Aye. Always was. You'll do, Aybara. You're proper. Could have done with a few more like you at the Tarendrelle." A shadow crossed the King's face, passing so swift that Perrin might have imagined it. "No. I wouldn't wish that on any man."

"We remember" Perrin whispered, fiercely. "The land remembers and the blood sings of it."

"Will you do something for me, blacksmith?"

Perrin cocked his head. _By its apple, ye shall know the tree._ You always wanted to be careful of saying yes to one of Mat's requests ere you heard what it was. Mat was tricky, and he had no doubt Aemon was canny, too.

"Within reason" Perrin said, warily. _Don't give him an inch._ "And only upon the condition that you give Mat his body back."

"When you return, fill a glass for me, and drink to the honour of the Rose of the Sun. She was some woman."

"That she was. Consider it done."

"The very best of women, Aybara. Truly."

"On that, Aemon al'Caar, we are going to have to agree to disagree." Perrin assured him. "You have not met Faile Aybara."

Aemon laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, pulling a tragicomic face. "Don't tell me. You married a Saldean woman. You pure double-dyed _woolhead_ …!"

* * *

Perrin watched the King walk away into the swirling mist, bare-headed, towards the van of the battle. The men of Manetheren heard his voice raised in song, brisk, wistful. Hopeful. Mat's voice. Aemon's voice.

" _Of all the money I ever had,_

 _I've spent it in good company –_

 _And all the harm I've ever done,_

 _Alas, it was to none but me._

 _And all I've done, for want of wit,_

 _To memory now I can't recall –_

 _So fill to me the parting-glass,_

 _Goodnight, and joy be wi' you all._

* * *

 _Of all the comrades that ere I had,_

 _They are sorry for my going away –_

 _And all the sweethearts that ere I've had,_

 _They would wish me one more day to stay._

 _But since it falls unto my lot_

 _That I should rise, and you should not –_

 _I'll gently rise, and I'll softly call –_

' _Good-night, and joy be with you all.'_

* * *

 _And may we drink, and not be drunk,_

 _And may we fight, and not be slain –_

 _And may we court a pretty girl,_

 _And perhaps be welcomed back again._

The men of Manetheren listened as the song fell at last into echoes. Watched wordless as the gloom caught up the last King of the Mountain Home.

 _And since it has so ordered be_

 _By a time to rise, and a time to fall –_

 _Come fill to me a parting glass,_

 _Good-night and joy be with you all."_


	86. Chapter 86: The Red Joy

**Chapter 86: The Red Joy**

Faile Bashere registered the blow that would kill her. A savage backswing of a flanged mace that would crush her skull like the shell of a wren's egg.

It seemed she had all the time in the world to anticipate that final agony, even as she desperately threw herself backwards in the saddle, knowing there wasn't enough room, enough time, the long knives in her hands children's toys against the reach and brute strength of the enemy _clibinarii._ Her own sword smashed from her hand long ago, the light sabre all but useless against the enemy's steel plate.

The blow never fell. With a scream of torment, her foe's stallion reared up precipitously, wild-eyed, iron-shod hooves thrashing convulsively, as dangerous a weapon as the rider's mace. The press threw the body of the black bay against her slighter mare, staggering her with the warhorse's weight.

Faile Bashere caught a glimpse of a knife embedded deep in the horse's flanks, the rent in the steel barding sheeted in blood, as the poor beast toppled backwards, crushing his rider beneath it in his overthrow.

Shasta's knife. The topknotted Shienaran bulled his horse through the press to regain her side. His face under the visor blood-spattered. Fearsome as ever Uno had been. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw an enemy swordsman take an ill-advised hack at her carle's heavy, battered shield, worn upon his left arm.

Shasta's reprisal was punitive as he rounded upon the luckless man, rearing up in the high cantle of the saddle, raising a falchion high overhead, the cleaver-bladed sword already blooded. With a feral growl, he hewed the blade down, a brutal hack, aimed not at the enemy men-at-arms but at his horse's head. The broad steel head split the beast's skull down to the jawline, steel chamfrons and all, and its forelegs collapsed from under it, spilling the hapless rider forward into the range of Shasta's wicked weapon.

The weapon came down repeatedly with savage relish, punctuated by the Shienaran warrior's exhortations, the grisly sound of metal plate rending and bones snapping like kindling as Shasta belaboured through the Tzuran's vambrace, then his collarbone and ribcage with repeated blows from the heavy instrument. "Don't – bloody – try – me – you – f….." He paused, belatedly recollecting the presence of his Queen, shouldering his cleaver, helmeted head already turning, always alert for foes blindsiding him. "Sorry, m'lady."

A moment of stillness at the eye of the storm, the leviathan mass of armoured men and horses momentarily becalming them, though ever enemy fighters sought to break through to where the Three Carp banner of Saldea flew.

Faile looked down at the enemy knight, opened breastplate to backbone by Shasta's onslaught, felt her stomach do a lazy flip as her gorge rose. Light, his ribcage was broken open like a roast chicken plucked apart by a hungry man's grease-stained hands. "As you were, Shasta" she managed, faintly.

Shasta had to shout to be heard across the melee. "Stay near me, m'lady. And don't try to kill the men. Kill their flaming horses."

 _How horrible,_ Faile thought. _How exquisitely vile._ Killing men who had chosen to be here was bad enough, but at least they had agency. Their decisions had led them to this barren heath, this gladiatorial arena of blood and death.

The veteran warrior Shasta was her shield. Without him, her lifespan would be measured in heartbeats. She regretted her own presence, for it endangered his. Yet the men would fight better for her being there, risking her life alongside theirs.

The Three Carp still flew. But for how long, the Light alone knew. The enemy light lancers had been easy, because their captain had been a reckless fool. They had sought to rend her flanks with slashing attacks. Saldean fire discipline under the withering, interminable archery of the Goong Sul horse-archers had left them with enough arrows to empty saddles, killing hundreds and setting the rest to flight.

The _cataphracti,_ by contrast, had been, in Shasta's inimitable verbiage 'shit-hard'. At the onset, the Saldeans had the advantage, long ash lances reaping lives, and as long as they could, her disciplined _éored_ charged, breaking off to wheel away rather than being dragged into a vicious close-quarters brawl. The Seanchan _cataphracti_ were melee killers, horse and man all but invulnerable, wearing hundredweights of armour plate inches thick.

Inevitably, her horses had tired. Inevitably, the two heavyweight forces had become inextricably enmeshed. Now it was a dirty, ugly gutter fight, a claustrophobic, deafening, terrifying din of scraping steel, whinnying horses, the screaming of foully-wounded men crying for the Dragon to save them, for their mothers to hold them. For the release of death itself.

If you fell from the saddle in this constricting press, you were as good as dead. Her father's advice, ringing in her ears. _Warm work. Don't get knocked from the saddle, little falcon, you will never get up!_ Crushed to death between the armoured flanks of the steeds as they collided together with tectonic force. Trampled under into the bloody mire.

Faile's legs gripped her mare's flanks in a constricting embrace, resolving to hang on for grim life. With express reluctance, she used her knives, as Shasta had told her, upon the enemy horses. On any portion of the armoured foe – man or horse – that came within her range.

The melee was disorienting, appalling, distracting. One moment, an enemy rider seemed leagues away, fighting someone else, then of a sudden his steed was broadsiding yours, and you and he were scrapping, exchanging a flurry of blows until one of you died, or the vagaries of the press separated you.

Shasta was a killing machine, the more so because the battle-madness was upon him, the red joy. Uno's son was utterly fearless and ferociously committed. Most of the men he fought froze in the face of his conviction, the keening joy of his battle-scream telling them Death was upon them.

Shasta was not a great swordsman, no Lan Mandragoran. He was braw and strong, long limbs informed with a terrible, explosive quickness, and he wielded his fearsome weapon – a sword with the range and killing weight of a polearm – as if it was a willow switch. He also seemed possessed by a preternatural instinct for danger, a creature of uncanny instinct, a centaur – head on a swivel, assessing, alert. Decisive.

He was a holy terror, a butcher drenched in other men's blood, and right now, Faile Aybara would not have exchanged his presence by her side for any other, save Perrin.

Two men closed upon Shasta, seeking to broadside him, assail him from either side with mace and morningstar. The red knight reared his horse, the iron-shod hooves causing one man's mount to shy away involuntarily, buying the time for the Shienaran to weigh down upon the other man, falchion flashing in a ringing downward blow that cut through his foe's mace arm at the elbow.

The first man had recovered enough to dance his mount in to flank Shasta, setting him up for a swinging blow at the Shienaran's pauldron.

He never made it. All his attention taken up by the dangerous warcarle, he never saw Faile, who had worked her slight mare in behind him. Her long knife found the sweet spot under the armpit, and her victim twisted as she drove the dagger home, as deep as her strength allowed, her gauntleted hands reddened, obscenely warmed by the letting of his blood.

Shasta briefly nodded to Faile, abruptly twisting in the saddle to lunge with the falchion, scoring an enemy steed in the foreleg.

Shasta turned to her. He was more than her shield in this desperate fight. She prized his innate ability to comprehend the ebb and flow of battle like a Wisdom reading the weather. "They're killing us, my Queen." His voice dispassionate. "We need to cut our way out of here, if we can."

It was no surprise. They had been outnumbered three-to-two at the onset by the Tzuran and Ramporan heavy horse alone.

"What do you suggest?

"Try and force our way back the way we came, uphill. The horses are all but blown, but we can get enough of a start to find a good place to make a stand. Find some high ground if we can, and make them come to us. Fight from the saddle as long as we can –" here, Shasta turned, a gore-spattered blur to depilate a Tzuran head from its wearer's shoulders "– and then form a shield-ring."

Shasta paused, and if Faile had not known her bannerman better, she might have thought he was embarrassed about something. "Meanwhile, I and a dozen or so of the better-mounted Fish Guard can escort you the s- – the hell out of here."

"While my countrymen die in my stead?" Faile was angry. "No. Unconscionable. We die as we have lived. Together." _I'm sorry, Perrin. I hope you can understand._

If anything, Shasta's honest face expressed relief. "Ach, who wants to fl- to live forever, anyway?"

Faile forced a grin. "Quite right, Shasta. Quite right." A thought came to her. "Let's see if we can gain the crest of the rise whence we came." _Perhaps I can see my Perrin from there. One last time._ "Shasta. Thank you. For your service."

At that moment, Faile realised for the first time just how young he was, for all his sword-skill and experience. "Don't fl- don't bloody well mention it, m'lady." Shasta managed, colouring to the roots of his hair.

"Ah, see, you've gone and spoilt a touching moment, Shasta." Faile answered archly. "And you were doing so well. You and your language, young man!"


	87. Chapter 87: Grapes Of Wrath

**Chapter 87: Grapes of Wrath**

The notched edge of the skyline, the iron grey of an unsharpened cleaver blade dulled with disrepair, taunted Perrin, drew his agitated gaze more often than it should in the long moments since Faile led her Saldean host over the ridge and into desperate battle.

Dull or keen, the horizon was sharp enough to divide what should have been inseparable. Heart from body. Life from breath. The gulf between him and Faile an angry slash of charcoal marring a pristine piece of white paper.

 _There's nothing to be gained by looking and fretting_ , Perrin told himself, for the umpteenth time. _Don't torment yourself. Focus upon what you're about. Do your own duty; let Faile attend to hers._

Sound advice. His mournful amber gaze returned to fruitlessly scrying the barren slope, nevertheless. There was no remedy for it.

This battle was not the elemental, primeval struggle of _Tarmon Gai'don_ that he had experienced at the Field of Merrilor. This was a contention amongst men, no less savage for that, but organised, discrete, a blacksmith's puzzle with many interlocking pieces. _Light, Mat, I hope you know what you are about._

There had been a temporary, undeclared but recognised truce in Perrin's zone of conflict, the centre of the sprawling battle, where the Aiel and Two Rivers archers now warily regarded Seanchan light infantry and crossbowmen across the man-made lake Mat had contrived to destroy the Arangore and Seandar men-at-arms.

The Aiel had also observed the armistice – _ji'e'toh_ evidently leading them to the same conclusion as the Two Rivers folk that there was no honour to be gained for now. Seanchan soldiers still waded through the befouled waters, dragging injured comrades to safety, though their captains had begun to chivvy them back into formation, preparatory to a secondary assault.

This impasse clearly did not extend to the _Asha'man_ and _sul'dam_ , who contended in their own, intensely personal vendetta, setting about each other with the inveterate hostility of a blood feud.

The Battle Guild, heavily outnumbered, held to their tight-knit shieldwall, _Asha'man_ in the outer ring maintaining a layer of hardened shields of _saidin,_ whilst men of the second ranks sporadically assailed their enemies through the gaps with lances of Fire, or called lightning, or hurled flurries of Deathgates and other disruptive weaves.

However, there were many more _sul'dam_ and _damane_ , and the assault upon the tortoise-shell dome of _Asha'man_ shields was incessant, sending writhing sparks of blue fire crackling over the surface of the dome like hot fat skittering across a griddle.

Their strife was far from a bloodless battle. Since drawing overwhelming fire, the _Asha'man_ commenced a grudging retreat, shuffling backwards with infinite care, a pace at a time, seeking ever to maintain the life-preserving integrity of their bulwark.

They left behind fallen comrades in ones and twos, tiny, wizened husks of burned bodies upon the ground, so charred that even the carrion birds would not touch them. _Asha'man_ who had stumbled, men whose shields had failed, men who had been slain from a distance by a probing assault through a chink in their armour. Disarmed men, sundered from the True Source by a shield of Spirit, before being cruelly slain by diverse weapons of the One Power.

The men of the Black Tower died in their ranks, their deaths unremarkable. Anonymous. In contrast, the _sul'dam_ and _damane_ who joined them in death perished as individuals, smote down in a public display of divine wrath. Torn apart by Deathgates, annihilated by sudden lightning or set ablaze like candles to caper, burning, to the horror and affright of all who witnessed the sight.

* * *

On the left flank of the battle, al'Akir Mandragoran led a wedge of Malkieri cavalry, driving deep into the heart of the enemy ranks. Here they met stern resistance, a tide of Seanchan infantry flooding around to encircle the Borderland armour, even as the Golden Crane sought to cut a bloody path towards the Hawkwing banner of Mordred Paendrag.

Even as the Seanchan sought to close their fist upon the defiant Diademed Crown Prince of Malkier at bloody cost, like a man seeking to wrest a dagger from its wielder by the blade, the encircling host, coming under the auspices of the fortification of Nadin's Peel atop the ridge, suffered a mauling from the relentless bows of the Aiel Maidens and the mechanized murder rendered by the repeating crossbows of _Shen en Calhar_.

The lightly-armed infantry, a slow-moving herd, died in droves, unable to escape the storm of missiles. Soldiers seeking to escape the torment of the arrows tried to force their way back whence they came, whilst the advancing soldiers were driven forward by the impetus of those behind them, until they could neither advance nor retreat.

They became a milling herd of confused, terrified soldiers, smelling each other's fear and blood. Men on the verge of panic already. Still the bodies stacked up like cordwood, a high-tide line of arrow-reaped men and their equipment that became a rampart, then eventually a steep-sided hillock the height of two men.

Soldiers that fell – injured or exhausted or suffocated – were trodden heedlessly underfoot by their comrades, until there was no longer space for a man to fall. Packed so tightly together that they could not move, that comrades fought each other to earn the space to draw a breath.

It was into this press that al'Akir's cavalry plunged their lances, spurred their steeds. The armoured weight of their onset carried into the ranks of men who were compressed together so tightly that they could not wield their weapons, could not hope to defend themselves from Borderland iron. They were grapes in the press of the Creator's wrath.

Thus it was that the Malkieri broke the Seanchan right, for all their overwhelming advantage of numbers, a terrible slaughter that the Light turned its gaze away from. The wrack did not even have the mercy of being a rout for the vanquished, for they could not run.

The lightly-equipped Seanchan died there in their multitudes, by the tens of thousands, and though al'Akir would fain have let beaten men run, he dared not. Their preponderance of numbers, even now, ensured that if he gave them pause to regroup, they could overwhelm him.

So passed the grimmest hour of the battle, and few indeed of those who faced the warlike men of the Border marches lived to tell of it. It was not a tale to be framed in song, unless the bard wished to bear as grim a report as the Lament of the Long Night.

* * *

Still, their deaths were not needless, for they served the cold pragmatism of their captain. Whilst al'Akir clove through the hemming host with bitter spear, Mordred Paendrag gathered to him his Deathwatch Guards.

Twenty-five hundred strong, armed with heavy, killing spears and girt in _cuendillar_ armour, the Usurper placed them to bar the path of Malkier's cavalry, to turn them back. A handful of men, compared to the unnumbered slain, but you could not reckon their worth by numbers alone, Mordred knew. Planted in the right place, they were worth an army by themselves.

The colt-like edginess that had come from facing his legendary father across the battlefield had fallen from him like a discarded cloak. At the outset, with an all-but insurmountable advantage in men and materiel, Mordred had been conservative. Cautious. The battle had been his to lose – and he'd been busy losing it ever since with his pusillanimous strategy, his reliance on mere _numbers_.

Now, with the enemy waxing confident, riding their growing momentum, the wild horse of _ta'veren_ luck, his own forces reduced to an inchoate scattering of game pieces rather than a cohesive whole – now Mordred had found his centre, in the eye of the storm, the still centre of a barostat of fathomless pressure that most men would crumble under.

Not him. His mind was as cold and clear as distilled water. Mordred's face under his proud, billed battle helm was serene, unlined and smooth as the sleek raven coat of his armour, framing his delicate features in a reflective, even gentle cast, but his eyes were hard gemstones, glittering balefully.

The Emperor had realised that at the beginning of the battle, he hadn't been psychologically prepared. For the first time, he had realised the consequences of his actions in human terms rather than as moves upon a game board, faced the weight of guilt that _Caisen Hob_ had succeeded in walling off from him.

The rawness of what he'd subsequently felt had overwhelmed him. Consequently, Mordred had checked out, emotionally. Perhaps, on some subconscious level, he'd not been ready to seize the moment. He had capitulated, offering only the tired predictability that was the hallmark of lesser men. Men afraid to lose.

The few successes he'd enjoyed during the battle – most notably the activation of the Guardian in the enemy fortification – had been the design of his subordinates, notably Beca Surehand. Mordred's sole meaningful contribution thus far had been the wild-cards he'd introduced into the deck in Liandrin and Darryl Harlan. This ruse had not borne fruit, it seemed.

Now, Mordred was ready to _fight._ Not for his destiny. Not for pre-eminence. Simply because this was what he was born for. This moment of risk and calculation, strategy and bluff, an examination he had spent his life preparing for. A high-stakes card game with everything he owned wagered upon the outcome, including his life and reputation. A Stones board, where the wild talent of a genius might make a brilliant extrapolation from a seemingly haphazard placement of stones.

He _wanted_ this. More than he'd ever desired anything in his life. If destiny intended to stop him, if _ta'veren_ and _ta'maral'ailen_ snared his feet, if the Creator Himself stepped down from Heaven to bar his path, he would fight them all, to the last iota of his will, with all the formidable resources of lucid mind and resolved heart, with every last weapon at his disposal.

Crooking a long-nailed finger peremptorily, Mordred summoned his _so'jhin_ attendant as his emissary, not wishing to divert so much as a single fighting soldier from the all-important task of checking the Borderlanders.

"Go fetch me two hundred _damane!_ " he hectored, raising his voice above the earth-shattering blasts of the One Power, the foundry clangour of armed battle. "Bring them here. I want Mandragoran dead!"

They would learn what it was to rouse an Emperor's wrath!


	88. Chapter 88: Serf Of Time

**Chapter 88: The Serf of Time**

Daeron Pellar was not as other men. A fact he had known from his inauspicious boyhood. Long before his difference became manifest to others. Before he began to channel. Then, the goodfolk of his hamlet could no longer pretend that the aloof man with the short-cropped blond hair was one of them.

When Daeron first began to tap the spigot of _saidin,_ nobody drew the Dragon's Fang upon his door in the dead of night, still less told him to pack up and get him gone by sundown.

Instead, Daeron observed how people would not meet his eyes when they talked to him. How women chivvied their children past him in the street, herding them past him like a sheepdog, as if he bore a contagion. The way the common room of the inn hushed when he walked through the door.

The worst of it was that they were all but unaware they were doing it, responding to deep-seated instincts, swift currents that ran beneath the surface of a winter-frozen river.

The unacknowledged difference – that he could channel – disguised a deeper truth. A difference much more fundamental, that rendered him the solitary denizen of his own, unhappy reality, blowing through the dusty streets of Medo like a tumbleweed, under the agency of an unseen breeze. Hands clasped behind his back, head down, trudging the thoroughfares, mouth pursed in the contemptuous half-smile of one privy to secret knowledge.

Hooded eyes bearing a kind of absent distraction. An old man's jaded cynicism, without the leaven of novelty. _See,_ those hollow eyes stated, wordlessly, _there is nothing new under the sun._

A man caught up in a joyless internal reverie – yet Pellar appeared to be a man immune to the vagaries of common mischance, stepping aside the second before a rawboned boy dashing after a pigskin football would have run into him. A man who won all too often at games of dice and cards, until his fellows would have none of him at the table, muttering about cheating and the Dark One's luck.

A man who bobbed above the throng like a child's balloon on a string, at once apart, immune from their claustrophobic concerns, the mischances and jostling elbows of humdrum humanity.

Daeron Pellar – by cussed inclination – was not a tractable man. Brusque, short-tempered and stiff-necked, he was despised by all the men who served under him. Of average acumen, with a mediocre gifting in the One Power, an inferior swordsman.

Delvers from the Guild of the Psyche had deemed him unstable. Damaged. Selfish and sociopathic. In short, the _Tsorovan'm'hael_ displayed none of the prerequisites demanded of a candidate for elite leadership positions within the Battle Guild of the _Asha'man_ , save for the necessary ferocity. The fire in his belly. Indeed, he possessed barely sufficient merit or experience to have earned the Dragon pin.

Despite these manifest shortcomings, Pellar was the obvious candidate to lead the _Asha'man_ in battle in the absence of the _M'Hael_ , Logain Ablar. To stand the first amongst his lieutenants. A poor swordsman who had never lost a duel, who as a raw recruit had often bested the training instructors, driving the blademasters to frustration and drink. A man who could never be outsmarted or out-thought. Who appeared to have the uncanny ability to guess his enemy's mind, and frustrate their best-laid plans.

Daeron Pellar was the exception that proved the rule. Logain Ablar understood that. It was one of the qualities that made the _M'Hael_ a great man. The humility to understand that the Creator oft used the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.

* * *

Despite himself, Daeron Pellar flinched at the nearby impact of a _damane-_ hurled fireball, hunching under the high collar of his black coat, a turtle trying to retract his head into his shell.

The white-hot missile, trailing a vermillion contrail, described a low, vicious arc like a stone from a sling, striking the bottom of a nearby comrade's shield with stinging force before rebounding harmlessly from the ice-slick carapace of Air and Water.

The _sul'dam_ were learning, extemporising, utilizing smaller, more concentrated weaves, trying to find the gaps between his men's shields, or – as in this case, trying to attack the ground under his men's feet, like a village cricketer bowling an underarm Yorker to take the wicket of a tenacious batsman. A vulnerability the _Asha'man_ 's shields could not fully guard against.

"Hold those shields out away from you," Pellar snarled, "or I'll know the reason why!"

His front rank were kneeling, the bottom edge of their shields grounded against this very vulnerability, but as the men tired under the strain, the temptation was to retract the shields, as it took less effort to hold them steady the closer they were to your body.

Another fireball glanced from his immediate neighbour's shield – near enough for Pellar to feel its heat, like coals on a brazier – before rattling from the angled surface, deflected.

This time, the _Tsorovan'm'hael_ managed not to start at the near-miss, his teeth clenched tightly enough that his jaws ached. It was damned difficult not to flinch. Even when you knew for a fact that you were in no danger.

 _You never see the blow that kills you_ , men said, in their ignorance.

For other men, that might have been the truth. But not for him. A blessing and a curse.

For Daeron Pellar was the man that time had forgotten. A man who dwelled within a Foretelling, a Talent of the One Power that had come upon him at the moment he first began to channel. A Foretelling that had yet to lift from him.

The skeins of the future wove themselves before his eyes, a jerky unravelling, like yarn from a bobbin on his father's loom, allowing him at times to see future events unfold as much as ten minutes before they occurred. A translucent reality overlaid upon his present, a _Gaidin's_ cloak flaring behind him as he walked, tugged by the breeze of _ta'maral'ailen._

As much as ten minutes, as little as ten seconds, give or take – that was the window into the future Daeron Pellar looked through. A future that wrote itself around him. The further ahead he was allowed to see, the fainter the image, the greater the strain he felt in his spirit. He had no control over it. _One day, the tension will tear my soul from my body, out of the Mirrors of the Wheel altogether._

The Foretelling was often a useless thing. It had not spared Daeron the clubbing blows of his father's fists that had punctuated his childhood and adolescence. They were blows that the future demanded he anticipate, walk into.

Only a scattered handful of times had he been permitted to exercise his free will, step outside of the closed loop of past, present and future. Moments where the yarn snarled, and he saw two possibilities ahead of him. Choices he was permitted to make that did not set in motion events that changed the future, the flapping of a butterfly's wings stirring the air that presaged the Father of Storms.

 _I am the Serf of Time_ , Daeron thought. _I am no free man_.

The _Asha'man_ offered amnesty for the men who belonged to it. It acknowledged no law but its own, not even the law of Andor. It was a safe harbour, a place of refuge for the men who belonged to it from those who sought redress for their crimes. Even for a kinslayer such as Daeron Pellar.

His father might have been a worthless piece of human refuse, of so little significance that the Pattern had allowed Daeron the choice whether or not to take his life. Still Daeron's uncles, his father's brothers were hard men of the same cruel stamp, former soldiers in the Shienaran army. Unforgiving men.

The teenaged parricide had fled before their oathsworn vengeance, to the Black Tower. There, he had found his place in the world. A place where he finally belonged. A calling for his talents of violence. Daeron did not know if he possessed the capacity for love, but he harboured an abiding gratitude and loyalty to Logain Ablar that bordered on worship.

Daeron watched a panicked Shieneran warhorse bolt past, eyes wide, a slain rider dragged unceremoniously behind by the stirrup. The house markings on the long _con_ banner affixed to the warrior's back unrecognisable as it smeared through the mud, its pole broken. Death was anonymous, ugly, and Daeron wanted no part of it.

He watched through future eyes as the horse narrowly avoided a stray fireball, before seeing the selfsame thing happen in the present a handful of seconds later. He was in the shallows of the river of Time as it rilled past, brisk and light, flashing on the stones, and that was all to the good, was it not? It likely meant nothing untoward was imminently about to happen to him; or at least if it was, he wouldn't have an eternity to anticipate it.

It was then that he saw him, through future eyes. An unarmoured Seanchan servant in black silks, his head half-shorn. A man who had no place being on a battlefield.

The fellow was plainly terrified, his headlong dash weaving through a congested throng of _sul'dam_ and _damane_ , many of whom cursed him, but none stayed him, recognising him as one of the Emperor's personal equerries. He was heading towards the banner, where the leader of the _sul'dam_ stood.

Pain filling the _Asha'man'_ s breast, bands of iron constricting his chest. The Power flared wildly before Daeron Pellar lost _saidin_ , falling to his knees, clutching his heart, unable to breathe. A gaffed fish hooked from Time's river, wrenched out of the present to expire on the bank, gasping in air he could not breathe. His present reality overridden by the imperative of the future and what it disclosed to him.

For the first time, he witnessed nascent events unfold as he stood apart from them, not through the vantage of his own eyes.

The Foretelling was done. Now he knew.

The future showed him two visions. Two possibilities.

In the first, the _so'jhin_ safely reached the leader of the enemy channellers. Following the Emperor's orders, the _sul'dam_ captain reluctantly sent two hundred of her charges to attack the Malkieri, an action which afforded the _Asha'man_ but a temporary reprieve from their otherwise inevitable end, overwhelmed and slaughtered by the Seanchan channellers.

But in the lull, Daeron watched through someone else's eyes as he grasped the chance to slip away from the battle. As he abandoned the men he led and made good his escape, so that he did not share in their fate.

In the next segue of the first vision, he had watched in horror as Seanchan soldiers – Fists of Heaven and _raken_ – combed the broken ruins of the Black Tower. He'd witnessed sneering _sul'dam_ drag Logain – bleeding, blinded and shielded – out into the courtyard.

Bodies lay on the cobblestones. Not just the black cloaks of fallen _Asha'man,_ but servants, farriers and cooks. Women and children, too. The slaughter had been indiscriminate. Thorough.

The chief _sul'dam_ had been there, too. A poker-thin woman with mousy brown hair, sallow skin and a cleft palate. She sneered at the _M'Hael_ , mocking his fall. "You shall make a fitting gift for the Emperor, Logain" she slurred.

There had been other _Asha'man_ yet living, shielded and guarded by _damane_ , wearing the bruised resentment of captives taken in war, Daeron saw. A dozen or more.

Close-fisted Seanchan soldiers had scourged them cruelly with whips of fine steel wire, stripped them naked and bound their arms behind their backs. They huddled together, heads bowed, unable even to cover their sorry nakedness from their captors' scorn. Daeron saw faces he knew amongst them.

He watched whilst the Seanchan sergeants – two ventenars in white-plumed helms – cast lots for their paltry possessions.

It was to the pair of officers that the hare-lipped _sul'dam_ turned, pronouncing sentence. "These others, I have no further use for. Kill them" she lisped.

Daeron screamed soundlessly, a disembodied voice, as the Fists of Heaven executed the condemned, one after another, slitting their throats with perfunctory efficiency as the _damane_ held them still for the knife with the One Power. The Pattern held his eyes open, throughout. Forced him to watch it all.

In the second vision, Daeron watched himself step from the ranks of his brethren walking towards the enemy. A small, determined figure, almost childlike, dwarfed by the wildness of the battle, the monumental forces of nature the _Asha'man_ and _damane_ arraigned against each other, bent upon mutual annihilation. The protection the Guardian's shields afforded him would otherwise have impeded his view, barring him the vantage he needed to make his attack count.

His lightning strike, lancing from a cloudless sky, burned the _so'jhin_ to ashes. The next instant, isolated, he paid dearly for the impertinence of his lone assault, swiftly overwhelmed by the onslaught of multiple _damane_ before he could regain the protection of his comrades' shields. An agonising, lingering death, screaming in the flames of a dozen fires as his flesh cooked on his bones.

For the first time in his life, Daeron Pellar had been gifted a real choice. The agency he had craved, had begged the uncaring Pattern for. Free will. The dignity of choice. Now he had it, and it mocked him with a terrible dilemma: Life for himself, or the possibility of life for the Dark Tower.

 _Be careful what you ask for. You may well receive it._

 _It wasn't a difficult choice_ , Daeron realised as he searched his stunted, selfish heart for guidance, as the vision beat upon his benumbed senses like his long-dead father's fists. _Not really._

Without the _Asha'man_ , he would be alone. Without the Dark Tower for succour, he would be anathema. The _Asha'man_ identity was written into his bones. A reality that superseded his criminality. A service that bestowed upon him a man's dignity. He would die for the Dark Tower, because without it, he was nothing.

Daeron Pellar turned to his second-in-command, raising his voice. "Coman, you're in charge now. I have something I need to do."

 _It's only duty,_ Daeron told himself. _Only death._

The dark-skinned Ebou Dari raised an eyebrow, but did not question his leader. He was aware of Daeron's Talent, and the unconventional decisions it often pressed upon him.

"As you say, _m'hael_ " his lieutenant acquiesced, his voice expressing the expected reluctance at the prospect of stepping into his shoes, but his eyes belied him, gleaming. Coman was clearly eager to seize the opportunity the battlefield promotion afforded him to advance his own career.

Daeron was strangely heartened to see it. He didn't want to gift the leadership to a man who would shrink from it. _A good man,_ Daeron reckoned. _An Asha'man through and through._ "If I may ask, what do you intend, sir?" Coman asked, diffidently.

"Something really bloody stupid" Daeron Pellar informed his subordinate, as he shouldered his way forward, the serried ranks carefully edging aside to make room for his passing, before closing fast behind him, leaving him on his own to face the enemy.

His eyes tracked the fleeing _so'jhin_ as the eldritch flows of Fire and Air for lightning gathered between his steepling fingers, a cold blue fire that silhouetted him against the men he had led. "Something right insane. But something that needs doing. Be steady, lads," Daeron added for the benefit of the others, tapping his temple knowingly with his forefinger. "You're going to get through this."

The heavens parted for him, a cleaving sword of white fire.


	89. Chapter 89: The Yielded Man

**Chapter 89: The Yielded Man**

Tuon's wordless regard interrogated Mat, who met her searching gaze with a countenance both frank and voluble.

"It transpires," said she, "that you are yourself one again?" More commentary than question despite the inflection: Mat could feel her relief through the bond.

"More or less" replied Mat, blithely: the offhand tone he adopted at odds with the keen pang of loss Tuon experienced through the Warder bond.

It was a pity, Tuon reflected, that the bond did not allow a woman to divine her Warder's thoughts, only mere feelings. Feelings, after all, that most men allowed to frame their countenance so freely, as if women had not the eye to see them, nor the wit to interpret them.

 _Do you find yourself lessened, Knotai?_ Tuon thought, the question that she would never permit to pass her lips. The question that would cheapen the both of them, and what they shared.

Mat's hazel eyes were opaque, yielding no answer. Even the merest fools of men knew enough to hide some things from the regard of the world, still more their wives. Yet the resonances of the Warder bond attested to something. A loneliness, an apartness of nature.

 _That you even think that tells me you do not understand, Tuon. The question is flawed._ It wasn't her fault, Mat allowed. She did not experience the harmonics of the past, hear as he did the voices of Aemon al'Caar and all the others, the echo of his own thoughts, his own feelings, resonate in the other lives that watched the world through his eyes and passed their heart's judgement upon it in unvarnished commentary.

They _were_ him – his own thoughts and feelings writ large or small depending upon the particular circumstance of that man's life. That was the truly frightening thing.

The dividing line between Mat Cauthon and Aemon al'Caar was a paper-cut in breadth, and just as keen. That was what had allowed the other man to step through when their heart's nature had the most closely aligned. His moment of true weakness, where Mat's deepest desire had been to cede responsibility, to not have to face his only son across a field of blood. To submerge his better judgement in wrath. Burying the onerous difficulties occasioned by real relationships under facile judgements passed down by cynicism.

He was tired. Tired of governance – the mastery of himself and others. Tired of war, even though the practise of it enervated a part of him.

Aemon al'Caar hated and mistrusted Tuon, and with good reason. At some level, so did Mat. That was the truth, no matter that that unlovely fear and hate was eclipsed, governed by the constant love of some twenty years. All men were selfish, he not least amongst them. Nobody truly enjoyed yielding, even to the righteous, even in the name of their own best interest.

All men feared that which they did not understand.

 _Mia ayende, Aes Sedai! Caballein misain ye!_

Bode had been right. It was his anger above all that had paved the way for Aemon al'Caar to step through, to take the helm. To become the agency behind the man who called himself Mat Cauthon. Light, his lust for destruction and death, the license of the vengeance that claimed him, had even turned Lan's stomach!

Aemon al'Caar had betrayed him – the agreement within himself brokered by the Aelfinn. An act of treachery at the end of a life of honour and service. Likewise, Mat had betrayed himself. The one occasioned the other.

Mat could still feel Aemon's presence. Wistful, resigned. In yielding to Perrin's demand for what was right, the King had found a measure of peace within himself that Mat did not have the heart to begrudge him. But to his sorrow, Aemon was still Bound to the Wheel, his spirit unable to leave Mat's body and go on to rest and renewal.

 _The Old Blood sings_. A covenant between Man and his Creator. A blood-covering for sin, allowing something of the Divine to walk amongst men. A hallowing, a fane where mortal could meet his God and find reconciliation. A place of pain for both, a world between the worlds, an imperfect construct where each ceded some part of their essential nature to meet and seek agreement, at great cost to both parties.

Mat's smile was wan. "Tuon, I need you to do something, for me." A question, if not stated as one. "I need you to release me from the Warder Bond."

Tuon coolly turned her head to meet his eye, serene and unique as a sable swan gliding across a mirrored lake.

"Wherefore, Knotai?" she asked, quizzically. It was typical Tuon, Mat thought, not without some irritation. Ever grudging to yield up a measure of control over others, once she had it.

 _Easy, Mat,_ he told himself, choking down upon bitter words. Tuon might begrudge him it, but he doubted she would seek to hold his bond against his will once he expressed the sentiment. Light, it was hard, though. Knowing that she had a full measure of control in this thing.

There was hurt in her eyes, too, eyes that shaded hazel like his. Hurt that he wished to step back from the deepest intimacy she had shared with him. The worst of it was, a part of him did want that lessening. Always had. Even though he loved her. _Because_ he loved her with all that he was. Love. A stormy sea dashing him upon a rugged headland.

Light, was nothing ever easy, or straight-forward?

"Because I need it, Tuon." Mat struggled for a truth they could both reconcile with. "And because the Warder Bond – the Warder bond and my own anger – allowed Aemon al'Caar to take over.

The Warder Bond causes him pain, Tuon. It's a thing of both the flesh and spirit. When you bonded me, it dragged him forward, letting him feel all over again the agony of his bond to his dead wife. Forced him into stepping through into my shoes, when all is said and done. I reckon that he and the others can finally be released. The Light above knows it's high time. Have a heart, woman!"

"I felt him too, Maitrim" Tuon acknowledged, and her gaze held resignation. A queen's surrender, formal and dignified. "Well, I won't hold your bond if you no longer want it. And for what it's worth, I truly hope in so doing, Aemon can be released."

Mat bent a look upon Tuon both relieved and quizzical. "You will release me? Even though the knowledge we might need to win this battle might be in one of those old heads?"

Tuon raised an eyebrow at that. A nuanced statement, artfully expressed: _How contrary of you, Knotai. Anyone would think you didn't truly want them gone._

 _A part of me doesn't,_ Mat realised. It was much easier to make difficult choices when he could tell himself that the orders he was issuing were the consensus of a sober council of war, not purely his own madcap extemporisations. And yet, to his surprise, a part of him wanted the challenge. To show that he was the equal of any of them, despite his humble beginnings. To stand on his own two feet.

 _Make way, you Heroes of the Horn! Maitrim Cauthon, the Gambler, wishes to take his place amongst you!_ Pure hubris. One thing was clear. He wasn't the same man that had left the Two Rivers two decades behind.

That man had possessed common sense!

It was as if his wife plucked that thought from his mind. "One might imagine," Tuon told him dryly, "that in twenty years, Knotai, you might have learned something from their tutelage! Besides which, it is as I said before. We don't do what is expedient any more. We do what is right. And under the Light, it is right to release these men, who no longer desire their bond to the Wheel, and release you, moreover."

Mat swallowed dryly. She was right, as always. "Then we should …"

Abruptly, Tuon wrenched away the Warder Bond unceremoniously, whilst Mat was mid-sentence.

It stung! Like a linen bandage being snatched from a raw wound. "Blood and bloody _ashes_ , Tuon!" Mat expostulated, wincing. "Could you not have done that more gently? Or at the very least waited till I'd finished what I was saying…"

Tuon's look stilled his complaints. The last time he'd seen that expression, it had been upon Artur Hawkwing's face. "Do stop mithering on, Mat! It doesn't suit you, and we don't have time for it. In case you had forgotten, we still have a battle to fight and win."

 _Right you are,_ Mat conceded. "Well, what are we waiting for, then? _Dovie'andi se tovya sagain_."

"You know, I hate it when you say that." Tuon told him. "It is generally the prelude to an uncomfortable quarter-hour of fidgeting and biting my nails, whilst the world turns upside down around me."

 _Fare you well, Cauthon._ A fading voice in his mind, so indistinct he could not swear to the identity of its owner. Yet somehow, Mat was sure it belonged to the Black Thorn.

 _Wait,_ Mat called after the receding echo. _I forgive you,_ Mat shouted after him, knowing it was too late. Too late to amend what had passed between them. Too late to acknowledge twenty years of fellowship. Aemon and the others were gone. The storied past claimed them as they stepped on into myth.

At that moment of exquisite vulnerability and loss, a Voice came upon Mat in that yielded moment where he acknowledged the sacrifice that his alters had made. It fell upon him, a knapping hammer upon a wedge of flint, shearing off that which was base and flawed in the ruthless necessity of making a worthy weapon.

WHAT OF YOU, HORNSOUNDER, GAMBLER? WHEN THE TIME COMES, WILL YOU CHOOSE TO SERVE?

 _Oh Light,_ Mat groaned in despair. _I should have known my fate when I was told my destiny lay not with the Heroes of the Horn!_ _Out of the frying-pan into the fire!_ There was nothing Mat Cauthon wanted less than to share Aemon al'Caar's fate.

Yet there was duty instilled in him, a mountain that could weather the long ages. Lan had shown him the reality of that obdurate yet yielded life. Tuon had given him a reason to choose it for his own. And Rand al'Thor's example had taught him that it was better in the long run for a man to embrace his calling than run from it.

Mat Cauthon sighed heavily, in acquiescence. _Of course I will bloody well serve, damn it._

"Of course you will," Tuon told him, brightly. _Light, had he spoken that aloud?_ "Are you quite well, Knotai? For a moment there, you looked as discommoded as a man who had swallowed a ferret."

 _I shall have to stop teaching this woman the aphorisms of the Two Rivers,_ Mat resolved _. She has a most annoying habit of bringing them to mind at the most discomforting times._ He bent forward, bestowing a chaste peck upon Tuon's cheek.

"Yes. I'm fine" Mat told his wife of twenty years, thinking the words a necessary lie as he spoke them. To his wonderment, they rang true.


	90. Chapter 90: The Stand

**Chapter 90: The Stand**

 _Be steady, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand._

The profession of a Malkieri sword-sworn in the long war against the Shadow. To fight this battle, and survive to contest the next. There was no place in their thinking for the vainglory of futile last stands. To be brought to bay meant you had already failed.

Al'Akir fought as he had been trained. Cold, clinical, meting his energy sparingly. Even strokes that feathered the air with chrysanthemum blooms of blood as he wielded colder steel.

Lan's training had hammered home the fundamentals that kept a man alive. _A battle is not a duel, son._ The son of the Crane Lord let the weight of the heavy blade do the work, lining up his targets, and sending them to _Shai'tan_ with pitiless efficiency. Methodical. Patient.

Yet there was a growing measure of anxiety in the young warrior, occasioned by his father's continued absence from the field. The veteran housecarle, Emrin had rendered a true account of what had taken place. Now the old man rode at the Prince's side.

It had been al'Akir's place in Lan's absence to pass judgement, and he had done so, with a heavy heart. _You were deceived, but you failed in your sworn duty, bondsman. Find expiation, then, Emrin. Ride with me, for honour and redemption._

It was a death sentence. They both knew it, liege and bondsman. Neither would have accepted a lesser forfeit. Honour's price was steep. But it was a price gladly paid by those who understood the value of what they bought.

Al'Akir had seen it in Emrin's eyes: _Let me play the man, one last time. Before old age conspires to ruin me!_

There was fresh blood on his blade. A renowned killer, he had once been, the victor of a dozen duels and the survivor of half a hundred battlefields. Red Emrin was still a perilous man, enlivened by his need to atone. His faded blue eyes as treacherous as the ice upon a thawing mere in spring, he worked the sword-forms from horseback with clinical proficiency. A half-step slow, no longer a vigorous man but persistent, still a warrior to learn from, there was an appalling measure of joy in those chilly eyes. Emrin was one of those born to war.

The Light moulded such men to fight the Shadow.

The slaughterous Malkieri advance had inevitably stalled, snarled in a detritus of broken bodies, slain men and their equipment. Horses too. Far too many of their horses. For it was no longer a disorganised rout of Seandar light infantry they had to do with. They fought against the very best the Empire had left to oppose them, the spear-carles of the Emperor himself, the Deathwatch Guards, their dun armour dark and bitter as green olives. And the Malkieri were losing.

The dun-coloured _da'covale_ that opposed them were all but baresark in their suicidal dedication to stop the Malkieri at all costs. Light above, some of them _were_ berserkers in truth. At least one of them that al'Akir saw actually tore off his armour, his thewy build tattooed from nape to navel with the Imperial Ravens.

That maniac perished impaling himself upon a Malkier spear in order to get close enough to the man killing him to hew his head from his neck, brandishing his gory trophy to the acclaim of his fellows. It made a certain statement.

Emrin cut that man down with great deliberation, from behind, for his second kill. That also made a statement, albeit one of a different kind. A pragmatic one. The battlefield was no place for chivalry.

There were only two thousand of the Deathwatch Guard, but their spears presented an impassable obstacle, affording the rest of the Seanchan the breathing space they needed to work round the Borderlanders' flanks.

The foe that the men of Malkier had been slaughtering with abandon up until that point were a different proposition, now. Brave men emboldened, men with a score to settle, the Aesdaishar highlanders rained javelins upon the men of the Golden Crane, crowded them behind their long, oval shields. They targeted the horses, and this more than anything else had brought the Malkieri to bay. Their war cries terrified horse and man alike.

"AWAKE IRON!" the Highlanders bellowed, brandishing their long knives. Some used flint stones to strike showers of sparks from their dirks, a pyrotechnic display that was alien and unnerving, even under the noon sun.

The mountaineers, in their short trews, were unarmoured behind their braw, brass-rimmed shields, but they gained much thereby in manoeuvrability, the fleet-footed warriors making better footing than the Malkieri could manage over the grim hillocks of corpses and through the mire of mud and blood that lay underfoot. A luckless or unwary horseman, or one dismounted, would be swarmed by a mob of the tribesmen, hacked to pieces before his comrades could turn to his aid.

The Deathwatch Guardsmen were working their way forward, just as hampered by the terrain as their Malkieri adversaries. Unfortunately, most of them were sober in their sanguinary intent, though no less dedicated to slaughter than their battle-crazed brethren, and they edged forward in a careful body, scrambling up the levee of broken bodies to bring the fight to the Borderlanders. There was neither space nor time to dismount, had al'Akir ordered it. But neither could the Deathwatch Guard oppose them in neatly serried ranks in this ghastly place.

 _This is the place_ , al'Akir thought soberly, and it was not the reflection of a young man. His future held no further adventure. No courtship of Shaiel, no seeking to earn a _Gaidin_ 's cloak. None of the heady aspirations that had inspired him. Callow things, they seemed to him now. No. He was fated to die here, where eager crows would strip the flesh from his bones.

Surely the red clay of _Al Chalidholara Malkier_ would spurn him, after leading his countrymen to such an unprecedented defeat. His unquiet shade would be doomed to haunt this place. Strange, cruel men would rule these lands in the name of the Crystal Throne across the sea. Aliens who would subjugate such of his people that survived these scarlet days. Women like his mother would be made subhuman thralls!

 _By my soul,_ al'Akir swore, _by my name, by my sword, it shall not be so!_

His father had made a career of achieving the impossible. Once, in boyhood, al'Akir had asked a child's juvenile question of the greying man of iron. "How do you kill a hundred men?"

Lan had addressed the question with a man's sober judgement. "One at a time, lad. One by one. One stroke of the sword at a time, until the thing is done."

And that was the truth of Lan's life. One sword-swing at a time. Until the job was done.

Lan had been gentle in raising al'Akir, knowing that the slightest unkindness might stunt his growth, impair his valour and manhood. He had never mocked al'Akir, even when he forbade a thing, such as al'Akir training as a _Gaidin_ , even though at heart it was a foolish thing he sought, for all the wrong reasons.

Until now, al'Akir hadn't understand why Lan hadn't simply dismissed the asinine question, told his son that he didn't even comprehend what battle was, let alone the impossibility of the task.

Now, al'Akir had a glimmer of understanding. _Aan'allein_ could not afford to lose, even once, whatever the odds. And where the Man Alone could not fail, even more was expected from the King of Malkier. It had been a burden Lan had been unwilling to bear through much of his life, a thing that made a great man tremble. And that was the calling al'Akir had been born into.

 _How do you kill a hundred men?_ It was expressly the kind of question that a King of Malkier might well have to answer.

Well, al'Akir was young, hale and well-trained. Lan had done his part. It was time for him to do his. He had no excuses for failure, if any man truly did.

Al'Akir squared his shoulders, puffed out his cheeks, casting a hostile eye upon the ranks of the encroaching Deathwatch Guard. _Out there, there are twenty men I have to cut down. One blow at a time._

The Crown Prince raised his voice above the din. "Those of you who still have lances, pass them forward to the front, to men who can use them. The rest of you, make ready!"

It was time to fight. To fight, and to live.


	91. Chapter 91: The Gambler

**Chapter 91: The Gambler**

Mat pulled his battered hat from his head, frowning in absent irritation as he used his fist to bash the felt back into some semblance of shape, to all appearances more concerned with the shortcomings of his headgear than the strife unfolding an uncomfortable fifty paces from where he and Tuon stood.

Veiled Aiel struggled for dominance against their Seanchan counterparts, javelin and shield-armed light infantry, bright in quartered surcoats of green and red, who were steadily pressing back the _algai'd'siswai_ by weight of numbers. This enemy were no mean protagonists in their own right: Mat had a nuanced appreciation of their qualities from first-hand experience, both from leading them and fighting against them.

The attrition was frightful. Both sides' supporting auxilia poured arrows, crossbow quarrels and slingstones into each others' ranks, and the lightly-equipped combatants had no option but to endure the chastisement being meted out.

By dint of their numerical disadvantage, the Aiel bore the worst of it. Ordinarily, so pressed, the _algai'd'siswai_ would retreat at pace, whittling away at their pursuers as they chased after them, but with both sides fully committed to battle, the Aiel could not withdraw without abandoning their allies to certain death.

The Seanchan had closed the distance, and close-quarters battle with spear, sword and knife was joined. The centre of the Aiel line – scant yards from where Mat stood – had been driven back a score of paces, by the weight of the Seanchan assault, the standards drawing the attention and the ire of bold men who wanted the personal glory of wresting these banners from the Raven Prince and the Steward of Manetheren at the sword's point.

In the press, a man lived or died dependant on how well he had assimilated the training he had received, the conditioned reflexes of parry, riposte and counter. He lived or died dependant on the watchful eye of his comrade to guard him from the blow a man never saw coming. And he lived or died according to the Will of the Pattern.

The contest was as enthralling as it was appalling, pitting the individual weapon-mastery of the Aiel and their innate cohesiveness – a fluid, nuanced awareness of space and pressure, where a warrior depended upon his spear-brother to flank him as he darted forward, to cover him as he leapt back – against the serried discipline of the Seanchan; an almost geometrical precision as they advanced, a compact wall of shields that offered no purchase, bristling with sharp ironware that punched forward in short, controlled lunges, seeking vulnerable flesh.

The tall shields were weapons too, with a fighting man's body weight put behind them, a bludgeoning weapon, and their wielders knew how to utilise them for maximum effect.

Mat realised that he had trained these soldiers all too well. The harlequin-clad ranks were just as physically fit and committed as the Aiel. It was an irony that Mat Cauthon had trained these men to emulate the Aiel in many regards, seeking to commingle the discipline of Westland armies with the hardihood and tactical flexibility of the men of the Three-Fold Land.

At the onset, the Seanchan had suffered terrible losses, and Mat had hoped against hope the terror inspired by the veiled killers would unnerve the Seanchan, as it invariably had against the best armies that Cairhien and the rest of the Westland nations could field in the Aiel War.

The spear-brothers made battle personal. They conspired to take a man's life – a favoured tactic Mat saw employed was seizing the top of a soldier's shield-rim and yanking it downwards, clockwise, with the advantage of torque to aid the Aiel.

The Aiel's left-side neighbour would seize the advantage, his plunging spear transfixing the unprotected body of the compromised soldier, swift as a heron taking a fish. Once they breached the wall of shields, fearless _cadin'sor_ clad warriors would hurl themselves into the gap, laying about them with lances and long knives, their elbows, knees. Whatever worked. The Dedicated were living weapons.

Yet though the ferocity and individual skill of the Aiel gave them the initial advantage, gouging deep rents into the Seanchan lines, when they flagged, running out of ideas, the disciplined Easterners just kept grinding onward, methodically, closing ranks, their hobnailed boots treading heedlessly upon the corpses of friend and foe alike as they advanced. It didn't require brilliance upon their part, just grit and numbers, of which they had plenty.

Mat saw it happen all too often. An Aiel warrior would overplay his hand, get isolated facing two or three jabbing spears, and it would be over for him quickly, though more often than not, he took a Seanchan with him as he fell.

Flights of arrows zipped uncomfortably close overhead, fledged grey with goose-feathers, whipping in viciously towards the faces and bodies of the oncoming Seanchan in their pied coats of red and green. Two Rivers shafts. Two Rivers work.

Perrin's men knew their business. Targeted shafts from the master archers culled the herd, striking down enemy ventenars and centenars. "Any bastard in gold is a dead bastard" Mat had impressed upon them in no uncertain terms. "Kill the officers first, then kill every other bugger until the buggers bugger off and leave us in bloody peace!"

Without leaders, the enemy would lack cohesion. The more weak-willed and spineless men amongst their ranks – there were always some, no matter how strait the discipline, no matter how pressing the cause they fought for – might play the laggard, even try to slip away. That was how a rout started.

A man could hope.

The rest of the arrows were directed principally at the enemy flanks. The reason was twofold. First and foremost, by attacking the enemy wings, they would begin to ease the constricting pressure upon Lan's Malkieri, the steel hail funnelling the enemy inwards, herding them.

The second reason,… why, Mat wanted to keep certain cards close to his chest. Even from himself, perhaps! He was still unused to being alone in his own mind. Mat was hoping things panned out auspiciously, but this was battle, and things never went exactly according to plan.

Love and war were both gifts to madden a man's mind, offering a tantalising glimpse of ordained order that might be wrested from the chaos.

At this close proximity, you could hear the grisly sound of shafts striking bodies. It was not the muted thud of arrows embedding in the straw bales used for target practice, but a weighty, mortal thump, like the fall of a slaughterman's axe, and just as fatal for the recipient.

Mat watched two arrows strike the same man in the chest, a bare inch apart, each shaft independently transfixing the officer's heart. His short-sleeved vest of chainmail was no protection from this far-flighted death. The enemy officers were necessarily brave men and good soldiers, the insignia of their rank a gilt-edged death-warrant when the arrows flew. They always bore a disproportionate share of the casualties.

This fellow was no exception. The man died cleanly, chin hitting his chest, for all the world with the naivety of a man falling asleep on watch, his knees buckling under him as he fell upon his face.

Mat mentally saluted the marksmanship, whilst simultaneously berating the waste of a perfectly good arrow. A good general needed to be as tight-fisted as an army quartermaster. Particularly since by a quirk of fate or natural selection, the most venal of men gravitated towards the post. Even the able ones. _Especially_ the able ones. _Yes, I'm thinking of you, Vanin!_

Mat's gaze hardened as he saw the Hawkwing banner from afar. He tried to espy the compact strength of Mordred there amongst the enemy, at the centre of what he surmised to be a dense body of Deathwatch Guardsmen, obdurate as a knot in a plane of teak, and what must surely be a handful of Ogier Gardeners, considering their ponderous bulk, overtopping mere men by head and shoulders.

The sober bodyguards knew their job, that was for sure, their paramount concern being the Emperor's safety. If he could be easily distinguished amongst his men, he could be a target for a Two Rivers bow, let alone an assault of the One Power.

Mat failed to mark Mordred Paendrag. His son might well elsewhere directing the battle – perhaps even thousands of miles hence, watching events unfold through the safety of a pocket Gateway, though that was unlikely. Some notable Seanchan warlords throughout history had taken the gambit of a false position to extremes, going so far as to recruit a lookalike and placing the alter at the focal point in his own stead.

Like every stratagem devised by the mind of man, it had both advantages and drawbacks. Armies had been routed, their morale broken by an attack killing the false leader, the soldiers believing their commander slain in truth.

Once, or so legend had it, an enterprising fellow had taken advantage of the real commander's death by mischance to impersonate him and take his place as the head of a great House of the Blood. If the tale was to be given credence, the man was one of Tuon's own storied ancestors. One of the White Boar's too, for that matter – a fact Mat found particularly piquant considering Handoin's risible prejudices.

Tuon, of course, refuted it as mere myth. Folklore, you might say. Mat quite liked the tale.

For what it was worth, Mat's intuition augured that his son was there in person. And he would bet his _hide_ that Travelling there to attack the position where his son's banner stood would be the last mistake he ever made. Mordred knew the passions ran deep in such an internecine contest, and was cold enough to account for them.

That banner was a slight. A deliberate provocation. Doubtless, the position was sprung like the steel teeth of a bear trap. Mordred wagering himself, the bait between the fanged iron jaws to make it a tempting proposition, despite the insanity of it.

Something he might have done himself.

Not for the first time, he wished he had a telescope on him, then dismissed the thought. Decided he didn't want to see his son. Not now. A conflict deferred.

 _What are you up to, boy?_ Mat wondered. Even in his own mind, he refused the intimacy of naming his son. Besides, what given name should he call him by?

Mat couldn't know his enemy's mind. Another rule of warfare: _Don't try too hard to base your strategy upon what you believe your enemy intends. It is both lazy and reductive. Rather, make your own plan, and impose it upon your foe._

Aemon's words. Words to live by, as he had at the Tarandrelle and a score of other places across the Westlands from Tar Valon to the Mountain Home. Words to die by, too, as he had done at the place now known as Emond's Field.

Everyone made mistakes. And sometimes the forfeits they occasioned were unthinkable. The death of every living person a man cared about. The death of his _people._

This battle unfolding before him, through him, was as finely poised as the contest with Demandred. But so different in character.

What he and the Dreadlord had created was a thing of understated beauty. A Moebius strip of twisted black and white. By contrast, the essential similarity between he and his son had rendered this combat of a different nature.

Two fighters who knew each other's styles intimately invariably made for an ugly fight. This battle was a sprawling, open-ended entity, a hydra with neither beginning nor end, a Stones board where each sought to encircle the other's gaming pieces – his son's mathematical mind – and a landscape sown with precocious wild strokes, fraught with traps and stratagems – his own contribution to the fray.

The Stones master still sought to smother him, and had half-succeeded, enmeshing the Malkieri though at some cost, robbing Mat of his most potent and mobile asset, and was in the process of wearing down the Aiel by constant attrition.

Only the anchoring weight of Mat's Arafellin heavy infantry on the left wing prevented the overwhelming numbers arrayed against his centre simply driving his Aiel down the valley before them like a goodwife sweeping the dust from a room. If that happened, the Malkieri were all dead men, the battle lost. And sure as night follows day, Faile Bashere and her stalwart Saldeans could not hold back the tide of enemy horse for much longer.

Meanwhile, the Gambler waited upon the cards fate would reveal, hoping against hope for good river cards to make his weak hand playable. Meantime, he did what he could. A set of blocks and checks upon Mordred's aggression, allowing inroads where he must, where he could sustain the pressure a little while longer. His centre flexed like a bowstave under the hempen cord, but it held. For now. Somehow.

And if the cards he turned over were poor? He'd be basted in a hot oast. They all would, no matter how he tried to weasel his way out of the predicament. There were so many scenarios where Mat's army would be overrun. Precious few eventualities held the hope of final victory.

 _I want your eyes here, son. On me._ Mat took a deep breath. It was nigh time to take an audacious risk. To call Mordred's bluff. Between the Great Captains, there was nearly always a moment where strength was not enough, where skill was not enough in and of itself. A moment where – pun fully intended – you got to see whether the other man had the requisite set of stones.

The required quality wasn't wholly a matter of personal courage either, that was the funny thing, though obviously that was a major component of it. It compassed more. Confidence. Self-belief. A fellow's values. Things that were hard to identify, let alone quantify.

Had it been a matter of mere bravery, Mat wouldn't even countenance the wager. Uthair – no, Mordred! – Mordred was as brave as a bull, much more so than Mat believed himself to be, driven by furies even he didn't fully understand. Mordred loved war, and there was precious little he feared or respected. That much was plain. You couldn't butt heads with him. You had to make him think.

Mat hated himself for it, but he had no choice now. _I'm going to threaten the only thing worth caring about that I believe you still value. I'm using what remains of your humanity against you, son. Because it's the only way to stop you._

That time drew nigh. Nigh, but not yet.

Mat needed one more bold stroke, timed to a nicety. Something to set the young general yonder back upon his heels. A reminder that he was Mat bloody Cauthon – gambler, drinker and legend! A man who always pulled his irons from the fire, no matter how dire the situation looked. You were always better bargaining from a position of strength.

"You look smug, Knotai."

Tuon's voice pulled Mat from his musing. "I was merely reflecting how many reasons I have to be smug."

"I can only think of one, and you have the honour of addressing her." Tuon retorted, then surprised him with an unguarded smile. That all-too familiar reserve swallowed it a heartbeat later, her eye holding the businesslike gleam of a merchant getting down to brass tacks. "I take it you have a plan, then."

"Always." This was a well-trodden conversational gambit between them.

"A good one?" Yes, they had been down this road a fair few times before.

"Hopefully. It's promising, anyway."

Tuon shrugged, half-turning away to leave her face in profile. In that simple gesture, Mat weighed the weariness behind the urbane jet polish of an Empress, the fatigue in the steel that was her soul, a clockspring wound tighter and tighter until it snapped.

He took her hand. It was small in his, delicate yet hard. The calluses of a knifewoman, long lacquered nails dry as they clicked against each other like the jaws of a preying mantis. A dangerous woman, his Tuon, the more so for the strain she was under, the fathomless pressure that had fashioned her adamant. The same pressure that had crushed their son, reduced him to the broken creature he was.

A woman trying to lay down the weapons that had maintained her position, her very life, because she believed that was the right thing to do. There were many people in this world who saw the former Empress as an evil woman. Some of them were even amongst those he counted as friends. They had their reasons.

Mat didn't give a damn for their opinion on the subject. No doubt, women in Khoweal and Arangore told stories of the Gambler to affright their children, too. He didn't lose any sleep over that, either.

Lies! _No matter who else you lie to, at least be truthful with yourself, Mat Cauthon._

Deep down, he feared they were right. That one day he and Tuon might have to stand before the Creator with blood-stained hands, and make true account. They would be found wanting.

It was this claim upon him that caused him to agree to be Bound to the Wheel. All men of violence should pray for a similar chance at redemption. Maybe the _Tuatha'an_ had the right of things.

 _Maybe._ He wished with all his heart there was a place in the world for that forlorn hope.

"This plan of yours?" Light, she was like a dog at a bone.

"Is already in motion. The Plains of Maredo. The Fords of the Isen.. The relief of Shandalle.."

Tuon frowned, none the wiser. "What are those? The names of public houses, Knotai?"

Mat laughed wryly. "How I wish. No, they were battles. Long ago. One of them not long after the Breaking."

Tuon pursed her lips. "Never heard of any of them. Which should vex me, but I find myself unable to care overmuch." Her restless gaze returned to the battlefront, where the fraying Aiel ranks wavered. Not so much a bow under strain as a sheet of paper about to be ripped asunder. A knot of Seanchan briefly punched through, a hardened clump of shields battering through a line that was barely two men deep.

They were swiftly destroyed, Fire and Earth wielded by Aiel Wise Ones, and the breach they briefly gouged in the Aiel ranks repaired itself with alacrity, a wound scabbing over. Parity restored. For the time being.

"You don't have any reserves, except those Wise Ones to plug the gaps." Tuon commented, seeing the obvious. "And they're burned, now the enemy knows where they are. The _damane_ will pin them down. The next time they break through, it's over. You know that. Even _I_ know that."

"True. But I've stopped playing the game, Tuon. I'm playing the player. You'll see. And anyway, there _is_ a last reserve. Me and you. Us and the Two Rivers archers, if it comes to that." Mat grinned, and twenty years fell from his face. "You fancy it?"

"Very well." Tuon conceded, sighing heavily. "Have it your own way. I see you won't tell me any more than offering cryptic clues. I just hope you know what you're about, Maitrim Cauthon."

"You and me both, Tuon. You and me both! I don't have time to explain. Now I suggest you take hold of the damned Power, and be prepared to lay about you like a drunken Tairen High Lord. Doesn't look like we're going to be able to sit this one out."


	92. Chapter 92: Nothing For You Here

**Chapter 92: Nothing for You Here**

Tova bent over the delirious Saldean armsman. He was not long for this world, that was plain to behold. Plain as a pikestaff. The Ramporan fingered the haft of his crow's bill, the wicked weapon snug in a tooled leather scabbard as he gazed down dispassionately at the milk-skinned Westron, his pallor deathly with blood loss.

Tova left his weapon where it was. Bent to rifle through the man's possessions with indecent haste. His haul thus far had been meagre. These Borderlanders were iron-rich but gold-poor. Tova eyed the man's cleaver-like blade, before stowing it at his belt. He had a better, but it had resale value.

He must in haste, ere his captain called him back to the battle. Captain Adza had no time for anyone he deemed to be shirkers or freeloaders, most especially on the battlefield. Man had a habit of nailing them to passing trees. No trees in Malkier, but Adza was a resourceful man, and Tova didn't doubt he would find some truly nasty way for Tova to spend his last few hours in this world.

Wait, that was much better! A jackdaw glint entered the _cataphracti's_ eye, as he glimpsed the glint of gold upon the dying man's finger. A worn circlet of Andor true, if Tova did not miss his guess. He had an appraiser's eye for the aurific. A real surprise. Young armsmen – poor young men – might be betrothed, but few married young. A wise father would scorn the match, till the youth proved he could provide. This lad was the exception that proved the rule.

The Saldean obstinately closed his fist upon his prize, feeling the touch of Tova's fingers. "Here, none of that, ye bad sod" the Ramporan muttered, as he drew his belt-knife.

He only meant to pink the man's hand to make him release it, but finding the ring a snug fit around the Saldean's bony knuckle, the keen blade made short work, sawing through gristle and cartilage to sever the finger, the ring with it, which he quickly stowed away about his person before his messmates saw what he had on him.

A hand fell upon his shoulder, and Tova looked up into the broad, bearded face of Amras. The older man was smiling. "Never think I miss a trick, old son. Never think that" the veteran mused, sadly. "Ah, messmate, ye have wounded sair this soft heart o'mine."

Tova's knife was at Amras's neck in a heartbeat. The Captain was death – literally – on fratricide, but what the worthy Adza never saw would never grieve him. Tova would return to the ranks with a sad tale of a treacherous Westron shamming dead and killing a boon comrade. Light, it had happened before. Matter of fact, that was the way the Wheel turned, sorry to say.

"Stow that shit." That was Cor, and not a man to be fucked with by any means. With a lingering glare for Amras, Tova reluctantly did as bade, slamming the dirk home in its sheath.

Cor was not only not to be fucked with, but the cunt was well-nigh _righteous_ to boot – in well with the Captain and his covey. Tova didn't think Cor's fealty extended to squealing to Adza, but who knew? So he well and truly stowed his shit, and shut his face into the bargain.

It wasn't over, though. That hefty bag of shite Amras had it coming, and the hour was well-nigh. And not a whore's son amongst them would shed a tear when it happened. The cunt was getting his.

Cor whistled appraisingly, dragging Tova from his sour reverie. "Well, I be dipped in shit" he exclaimed. "Dipped and dowsed. Would you look at that?"

They looked at that.

The top of the rise was where the Saldeans had made their last stand. It had been tasty for a bit, Tova acknowledged. That damned woman and her men had fought from the saddle until the last, until all of five hundred remained, and these had hewed their way clear. And to be honest, by that time, neither the Ramporans nor their bumpkin Tzoran neighbours wanted any part of the Saldeans. They escaped, but their carp banner had gone down, and with it that terrifying red-armoured whoreson who carried it. Job done, and fuck you very much for that, Captain Adza, sir.

Except that the Light must indeed love Tova, and that right well, for that damned woman, and that hulking monster that warded her lay upon the field together. And that damned woman was a Queen, no less. Her war gear alone must cost a fortune – a Blood's ransom in armour. And if the Bloodborn didn't have a hundredweight of gold or gems upon her person, he would _also_ be dipped in shit.

Tova felt his loins stirring. He intended to search her person _most_ thoroughly _._ The woman had been handsome enough, despite her blade of a nose, and a man had his urges, did he not?

Amras clearly was of the same mind, and the two of them shared a look. "I'm going to do her" the braggart declared, "and I'm going to make her sorry she were ever born, to boot. When I am through, she will be one ill-used woman."

Cor stared through Amras until the big man lowered his eyes. "You will _not_. You know the rules. We take her shit, we kill her, and then we hie our merry way." A gnarled carrot of a finger wagged its rebuke in the bearded man's face. "Nothing more."

Cor missed a second, significant look passing between Tova and his erstwhile foe. Amras hung his head in feigned shame. "Whatever you say, Cor. However you want it."

"Damn right" Cor scoffed, mollified as Amras half-turned away.

It was a ruse. Amras reeled upon Cor, rhomphoia swinging in a blow intended to separate the strong man's head from his torso.

Cor was not so easily taken. A dismissive backhand swipe of his flanged mace struck the cleaver from the traitor's hand. Then he jerked in surprise, biting through his tongue in his agony.

Swinging from the heels, with all his strength behind the blow, Tova had driven the spike of his crow's-bill into the nape of Cor's neck. Cor twitched galvanically, and for an awful moment, Tova thought that the deadly veteran wasn't going down. To his blessed relief, Cor let out a strangled gasp, pitching forward heavily upon the ground, his armour ringing a dull note.

Tova released a pent breath.

Cautiously, the two former foes regarded each other over the man they had conspired to murder. "Right" Tova addressed Amras. "Let's have it out now. However you want it. Either we do our best to do each other to death…. Or. We do _her_ , and we settle our differences at some later date."

 _No contest_. "You can wait. She won't" said Amras.

"Right, then."

A fading voice, dry as gravel, made the murderous pair turn slowly round.

"Nothing here for you here" it croaked.

Amras and Tova exchanged a look. "You have got to be _shitting_ me" Amras expostulated.

Tova chuckled grimly. The big red bastard wasn't dead. Indeed he had regained his knees, but no further. This might have been a big problem, except that the Saldean was clearly fucked six ways from Bel Tine. His armour was battered to shit, to the extent that in several places Tova could clearly see the quilted linen of his under-armour, which was crimson, saturated with the man's own blood.

"Tell you what, Amras" Tova said. "I'm going to enjoy this near as much as giving Her Highness there a royal seeing-to."

He addressed the battered Shienaran contemptuously. "Last chance to make this easy for yourself, big man. Put down that bastard sword, and I'll make this easy. Well…. Relatively easy, anyway. If you don't, I pledge that I will fuck you up. Grievously. I will fuck you like a Tzoran fucks his goats" he added for Amras's benefit, and the bully hooted troll-laughter at Tova's coarse sally as he hefted his cleaver.

The Saldean wheezed. Blood on his breath, but his bloodshot eyes still gleamed with malevolence. "Death" he managed. "Pain." Both were in Shasta's pain-wracked countenance, but both men understood precisely what the red bastard meant. Death and pain were yet within his gift.

Some bastards died hard.

* * *

Shasta watched the pair approach, through heavy-lidded eyes. His body was afire, but anger's resolve cleared his mind. Imbued him with singular purpose. Both hands tight about the hilt of his falchion, he measured the distance in his mind. He would only get one chance. _Best make it count, then._

These men were sloppy. They didn't even separate to take him, walking forward side by side like brothers, not the backstabbing pieces of …ordure they truly were.

His Queen was dead, Shasta believed, but that didn't mean they were going to get anywhere near her. She would get a proper burial. The Mother's last embrace. Then, and only then, Shasta thought, he would take a rest. He had an idea that when he fell asleep, he was unlikely to ever rise again. That was fine with him, though. It hurt like a motherf-…

 _No._ He was going to kill these b-.. two felons, and he was going to keep a civil tongue in his head whilst he did it. He owed Queen Faile that much respect.

 _You see, my Lady, I am a changed man. You didn't even have to wash my mouth out with soap to do it. All you had to do was die on me._

Light, but that thought hurt. Shasta pushed it away.

 _Nearly there, boys,_ Shasta judged, weighing up the advancing Ramporans. Or were they Tzorans. Who cared? It wasn't like he was going to be visiting either place in the near future.

Shasta let his weary eyes close. Kept his ears pricked as he measured their footfalls. He needed to lure them in. They might credit him shamming incapacity, but they would never think he was closing his eyes voluntarily. He hoped.

 _Right….about….Now._

Blacklance's Last Strike was all in the wrists. A sword-form that could be performed standing, sitting, or on horseback with equal facility. Even as Shasta was, kneeling in the dirt, the tip of his falchion grounded in front of him. The abridged version of the form ended with the spatulate end of the weapon driven through the heavyset man's visor. That man had to die first: he had the longer weapon of the pair.

That cleaver now fell from his nerveless hand as Shasta wrenched his weapon free, the bearded man reeling back, describing a short half-circle, like a chicken with it's head cut off. A horrible, choking gurgle issued from him, blood pouring from his rent face, staining the tabard he wore like a butcher's apron.

The bearded man stumbled over a corpse and sprawled heavily onto his back even as Shasta rolled his wrists in the parry, binding the shorter man's wicked falcon-beak.

Rat Gnaws the Grain hewed the Ramporan at the knee, the blow aimed expertly at the joint in the armour. There was barely any resistance as Shasta carved his leg from under him with the ease of a man slicing a chicken wing for the plate.

Tova looked down, incredulous, watching the blood pump from the stump of his left leg. That action caused him to overbalance, tipping forward and sideways to fall headlong. There was very little pain.

Sluggish, the Ramporan essayed crawling away, wondering at the effort it cost him to move numbing limbs. _Tired. So very…tired._

Shasta watched the short man quit moving with some satisfaction. Didn't much look like the other goatkisser was going to be up and about any time soon either. Hard for a man to look lively wanting half a head, in his experience. And these two poltroons were but men in name only.

Shasta let his head fall upon his breast. It was time to rest.


	93. Chapter 93: Sin Of the Men Of Stone

**Chapter 93: Sin of the Men of Stone**

Tuon turned to Mat. "I have it, Knotai."

Mat's attention clearly lay elsewhere. "You do? Good" Mat said absent-mindedly, a blank look upon his face. He paused, reprising what Tuon had said, frowning suspiciously. Framed Tuon in his one good eye. "Wait. Tell me what it is you think you have.."

Tuon did look somewhat pleased with herself. "I know what you intend to do."

Mat cocked his head, reading her expression. One part satisfaction, one part stupefaction, and one part abhorrence. _Yes._ It seemed she had penetrated his design. The Light send that Mordred had not done likewise.

The Prince of Ravens placed a cautionary finger upon his lips. "If you have, Tuon, keep your counsel, I beg. Don't speak it to a sparrow. Don't even _think_ on it."

"But Mat, that's .. appalling."

"Yes" replied Mat, gnomically.

"Why, that's nothing more than mere murder!" breathed Tuon, queasily.

"Yes, Tuon." Mat acknowledged, quite unperturbed. "Better them than us."

Together, the pair turned as one toward the western hills, watching breathless as the ridgeline amassed with silvered steel. They advanced under writhing serpent pennons of gold, red and black. Thousands of them.

Flowing around them, a ribbon of silk caught by the breeze, the pallid grey of Goong Sul tribesmen, mounted upon fleet steppe ponies. The horse archers swept around the heavy cavalry, plunging over the ridgeline and into into the valley below without hesitation.

The Ramporan and Tzoran _catapharactii_ surged after them, a steel avalanche.

This time, it was Tuon that took Mat's hand.

* * *

There was agony in Perrin's golden eyes. The annihilation of hope.

He wrenched his agonised regard from the ridge. Others had seen, too, the steel tsunami brimming over the horizon, a torrent of lances that would sweep down into the valley behind them uncontested and scour them away.

Wil al'Seen's panicked voice cut over the sudden hubbub. "Back! Back to the wagons!" It was their only hope for the Two Rivers men. Pointless to run. There was no chance of outstripping the seething tide of violence and death descending upon them. The laager was the only chance they had. It would buy them a few precious moments of life.

"We will HOLD!" Perrin growled, and silence fell. Wil quailed under _Sei'cair_ 's eye.

But al'Seen wasn't done. He kicked at a loose stake, once, twice, uprooting it from the soft earth. "You think these things are going to hold yon horsemen, Goldeneyes?" he spat sourly. "Because you got another think coming. Come on, boys." There was a muted muttering amongst the Two Rivers men, voicing general agreement, but no man stirred as all eyes turned to Perrin Aybara.

"Nobody's going anywhere" Perrin uttered, a quiet voice whose resolve carried further than the angriest shout. "At least, not back to the wagons. Our place is here. We're going to fire our remaining arrows into the Seanchan infantry. Then we're going to reinforce the Aiel."

"And what?" al'Seen muttered incredulous. "Just ignore the Wild Hunt out yonder, and hope it simply goes away?"

Perrin eyed Wil sternly. "Yes. That's the plan, in a nutshell. _Those are the men who killed my wife._ " The words ripped out of him, an agonised whisper. "There's nothing I want more than to deal with them myself. But they aren't our responsibility. Mat has a plan for them."

Wil trembled, but he refused to back down. "The same Mat Cauthon who thinks he's Aemon al'bloody Caar?"

Perrin's smile was a terrible thing to behold. An alpha wolf serenely considering the yapping of a rival. "That very man" he confirmed.

Will took a deep breath. Blew it out through his straggly moustaches. "Well, why didn't you say so, Lord Perrin? I guess we're staying here, after all."

* * *

Bak Ju Mong whooped as he released his chestnut mare down the long escarpment. Below, the terrible conflict unfolded, with a beauty and grandeur that spurred the Goong Sul's plaintive soul.

The battle lines stretched for nearly a mile, spanning the valley bottom from the river creek to the gentle slope he was angling down. He could hear the hollow boom of distant explosions, the muffled thunder as _marath'damane_ fought _tsorov'ande doon_.

The young warrior saw all at a single glance. They would not even need their bows. Just a decisive tulwar-stroke, a mounted charge skirting the stake-line protecting the Two Rivers archers, falling upon the rear of the hard-pressed Arafellin infantry in their coats of steel plate. That would be all it would take. They would reap glory with bare steel.

It would be the People of the Bow who won the battle outright. True, to them would fall a disproportionate number of casualties, braving the Two Rivers archers. But what was life without risk?

Bak Ju Mong leant over the mare's sleek neck, revelling in his flight, that he outstripped all others. A peregrine riding the Father of Storms. The youth set a bone whistle to his lips, keening a haunting note, a threnody of despair to his foes.

He was answered by others, their notes faint, far-off. Surely, he could not have outstripped his comrades by that much? Chancing a glance over his shoulder, he saw that he was alone.

His comrades were angling south by east, down the valley, away from the battle-lines. For the tent-city of the Malkieri, deserted behind the battle, for the opulence contained therein. Light, and no wonder, the very cloth of the command tent shone from afar, burnished by the sun – silk and cloth-of-gold. An embarrassment of riches, left unguarded.

Bak Ju Mong felt something cold clench his heart. A premonition. Terror gripped him.

 _Can they not see it must be a trap? A lure set for those with the sin of the Men of Stone engraved in their hearts?_ But he, Bak Ju Mong was undeceived. He could save his comrades, the men of his turma.

Savagely, the youth heeled his chestnut, whose powerful haunches bunched, hurling her forward like an arrow from the string.

In a hundred paces, he had caught up with the rearmost of his fellows. "Turn back!" he demanded of them, his wind-scraped voice husky with passion.

They scorned him, to a man for his presumption. "Go then, and die, if that suits you." Ip Hyun-Il spat contemptuously. "For my part, I intend to return home with the riches to buy many wives and a herd of fine horses!"

Anger unbridled rose in Bak's breast, anger ungoverned. Almost, he housed one of his precious _pyeon jeon_ shafts in his cousin's breast. Barely, he held back from the sin of kinslaying.

He abandoned them to their fate, then, seeing that their hearts were lost to him. He was lost too, in that moment. A man without a people, his days would be short upon the earth. In fact, his span would be momentary, he determined. He would be a comet tracking the void between the stars, alone. Meteorite iron, burning up in the skies.

An example: _This is a man._

Twenty lives in his purse, Bak Ju Mong twitched the reins, his heart decided. Cantering, he set his course towards the battle, alone. Towards the Two Rivers men, their bows of yew and arrows of blackthorn. Alone, he would test their legend.

* * *

Ip Hyun-Il used his belt knife to cut an artless hole into the linen side of a square tent, stepping through. The tall warrior whistled appreciatively between his teeth as he saw a round-topped wooden chest protruding from under a four-posted bed piled high with furs.

The chest was heavy. Indeed, he almost strained his back pulling out his prize out from under the bed. It proved to be locked – a sensible precaution, but useless, as Ip used a heavy knife to batter through the thin hardwood of the lid.

Ip's eyes widened. _Great merciful Light!_ The chest was crammed to bursting with heavy gold coins. Andoran, Tairen, Cairhienin. He ran his fingers through his loot, snatching up a coin at random, and biting it appraisingly.

His teeth indented the soft gold. The gold was pure, or at least highly refined. Enough gold to buy a herd of horses, a hundred wives!

A shadow fell upon him. Ip Hyun-Il looked up to see the daylight blotted out by the burly form of a Ramporan horse-soldier. Ip gestured rudely. "Go find your own loot, round-eye." Not a suggestion.

The big bastard stepped in uninvited. "Easier to take yours, you skinny little p-"

The hilt of Ip's throwing knife bloomed like a goitre from the Ramporan's throat. His eyes bulged, as he toppled forward upon his face, quite dead.

Ip tsked between his teeth, discommoded, reluctantly dragging the man's heavy dead body into the tent and out of sight, dumping rugs on top of it to hide the corpse. The Malkieri camp was crowded by thousands of Ramporans and Tzorans, as well as hundreds of his Goong Sul kinsmen. The last thing he needed was a fight with the dead man's comrades.

He returned to his golden bounty, digging avaricious hands deep into the treasure chest. Wrist-deep, his fingers no longer encountered the slick, cold texture of lustrous metal, but a gritty powdery texture. Nonplussed, Ip closed his hand upon the grit, coins and all, bringing it forth into the light.

There was a black, faintly greasy powder upon his palm. Ip frowned. Licking a finger, he collected a dab of the unfamiliar black powder, tasting it. Bitter, slightly acrid, the taste evoked half-forgotten recollections. Memories slowly rising to the surface, like marsh gas from a chilly mere.

 _Fireworks. Sky Lights. Gunpowder._

Understanding came complete, unwelcome and sudden.

* * *

Mat watched the enormous explosion blossom a mile away. A split second later, his ears were buffeted by the report, the hat blown from his head by a scalding gust of wind which snatched the Red Eagle of Manetheren from its lanyards.

"Human nature" he muttered to Tuon, shaking his head. Almost angry. "Bloody cavalry, always the same. Lordlings upon horses, with their brains in their backsides! Even the Heart Guard. Every time the same! Beat the enemy horse, and race to loot the enemy camp."


	94. Chapter 94: A Time To Soar

**Chapter 94: A Time to Soar**

The lone horseman made a bold figure, framed by the bilious orange of the conflagration that burst behind him noiselessly. A fire that imbued Perrin Aybara's gaze a baleful crimson. The rider sat a magnificent blood mare of fifteen hands. A spirited animal, or Perrin was no judge of horseflesh.

A horse that was poetry in motion, even now. A noble equine statue. The mount did not even flinch at the huge explosion, which spoke of the mastery of its rider.

The Two Rivers archers jeered the Goong Sul as their keen eyes saw him set an arrow to the string. All save Aybara, who felt distant disquiet. _Man looks like he knows his business._

An impossible distance. Four hundred yards or more. Near a quarter-mile! Far beyond even the range of Two Rivers yew. But the man – the youth, Perrin's sharp eyes deemed him – looked confident, strong young arms raising the bow high overhead, drawing and loosing.

The Two Rivers men watch the shaft soar, a hundred yards before the wind caught it broadside, tumbling it like chaff. A poorly-constructed arrow, the yeomen of the Two Rivers deemed it, ill-fledged, and they turned back to their business, shrugging derisively.

Perrin heard it first. The droning note of some monstrous wasp. A sonorous rasp. Even his keen eyes failed to detect the missile itself.

Wil al'Seen staggered, hand going to his throat, where the _pyeon jeon_ had lodged. A tiny dart, all of three inches long. A life-taker, nonetheless. Incredulity in his eyes, he fell. Perrin understood instantly, even as he stooped to al'Seen's side, hoping against hope that Wil yet lived. What they had seen was not the arrow, but its casing, enabling a shorter dart to be flung from a full draw.

There was no admiration in the Steward's expression as he closed Wil al'Seen's eyes. Stood slowly with grim purpose, _Mah'alleinir_ leaping to his ready hand.

It was time to soar.

* * *

Bak Ju Mong grinned icily as he saw the tubby round-eye fall. _One down. Nineteen to go._

After they were spent, he would ride in close, with his ten conventional arrows. Kill as many as the Dragon allowed, then if the Light willed it, close with them, tulwar in hand.

The dead man's companions were angry. Some loosed arrows at him, even though they must have known he was well out of their range. Bak whistled appraisingly at the enormous power of the yew bows, projecting arrows well over two hundred and fifty yards.

A good thing they did not have the _pyeon jeon._

The Two Rivers arrows fell within five yards of each other, attesting to the accuracy of the yeomen. Bak was glad of it. He was going to die at the hands of a foe worthy of respect.

Bak decided upon his next victim. A huge round-eye, with, of all things, a war hammer clenched in his fists. A round-eye blacksmith, who was staring at Bak as if he was a lump of pig iron on the anvil.

Bak selected his next shaft. Looked back at his intended victim. Blinked in astonishment. The man had disappeared, as if the earth had swallowed him whole.

The archer wasted a few seconds failing to locate him, before he shrugged, deciding upon a different target. This one looked like an officer, a leader, despite his unconventional attire, topped off with a broad-brimmed hat.

Some innate instinct of self-preservation made Bak turn in the saddle, his mare shying, dancing skittish as the air shimmered, as if with heat-haze. It disgorged the blacksmith, all six foot eight of him, and he came swinging, wielding a hammer whose head glowed amber fire.

Bak tried a snap-draw, but missed as that terrible hammer stove in the ribs of his horse, the weight of the blow lifting the mare's body from the ground. Bak was hurled from the saddle, rolling aside as the mare fell into the space he'd barely vacated.

Bak looked up into the blacksmith's uncompromising face with perfect understanding. Those amber, glowing eyes that could only belong to but one creature on the Creator's good earth. He knew what this man was. A wolf-walker. A shaman.

The hammer came down.


	95. Chapter 95: A Bloody Field

**Chapter 95: A Bloody Field**

Mat Cauthon took his hat from his head, and stood at the parade rest, his hands clasped behind his back, head bowed in respect.

He was watching the death of an army.

Noren M'Shar was the third-largest city on the Seanchan continent. It was a squalid sprawl that housed some four hundred thousand souls.

 _Nothing good ever came out of Noren M'Shar_ , they said, and: _The best prospect a Noren man ever saw is the North Highway out of the city._ They enjoyed a shifty reputation throughout the Empire as thieves, stand-up artists, cutpurses and pimps. A reputation that many strove to uphold, sorry to say.

But Noren M'Shar had held true to the Empress Fortuona during the Reclamation War. All the cities had. So Maitrim Cauthon, hat squarely on his head and _ashanderai_ in hand, had come thence to levy and train an army from its citizens.

Handoin must have thought it a grand jest when he heard. Of the one hundred thousand men Mat pressed into service, a shade under half deserted the day after they were recruited, taking their equipment with them to sell on the black market. Morale was non-existent, drunkenness and vice rife.

Yet somehow, Mat had instilled a sense of identity in the sixty thousand men that had remained. A cussed, us-against-the world mentality that meant they would rather die than take a backwards step. _We're the fighting men of Noren M'Shar. And we're better than anyone._

Suddenly, nobody was laughing any more.

It was that tenacity, that self-belief that was their undoing this day. The light infantry corps had driven deep into the heart of the black-veiled Aiel. Weathering appalling casualties, their disciplined assault had succeeded in driving the centre of the _algai'd'siswai_ line back some fifty paces, stretching the thin defensive screen of _cadin'sor-_ clad fighters containing them to breaking-point. But despite many desperate assaults costing thousands of lives, the fighting men of Noren M'Shar had not been able to overrun either the Arafellin men-at arms on the enemy left or the Two Rivers Wolf Guard on the right, and they were not to be faulted in this regard, Mat deemed. Light infantry against heavy infantry.

The Aiel, reinforced by the Two Rivers yeomen, formed three sides of a box. The Noren M'Shar infantry beat against those sides, vainly trying to force their way through, their front ranks stalled, compressed by the pressure from rear ranks still marching forwards, all the while under fire from the Band's repeating crossbows.

Instead of sundering the Aiel defence, the reward for their valour and persistence was a killing ground a half-mile square. They still outnumbered their _algai'd'siswai_ foes by nearly three to one, but only a tiny fraction of those men could actually face the enemy at any given time.

The attackers' position might have looked strong, an irresistible weight of men, but in reality, not only were they stalled, they were a group of black stones on the gaming board without an Eye, slowly being deprived of liberties as the noose of white stones tightened about them.

The Aiel, suddenly animated, pressed in on all sides as the trap closed shut. Fighting with redoubled ferocity. A constricting pressure that deprived the Noren M'Shar infantry first of breath, then of life itself, as their disciplined ranks became compacted past the point where they could fight effectively.

The noose closed, and the encircled men, frightened, breathless, constricted to the extent their shields were driven against their bodies, were easy prey for the Aiel. A panicked mob of frightened men, struck through by spears, pierced by squalls of arrows, suffocating in the press, with men clawing at each other desperately, some trying to clamber aloft upon their comrades' shoulders to earn a brief respite from the constricting pressure and fill their lungs with life-giving air, only to be dragged down by their fellows.

The slaughter was remorseless as the Aiel waded in, step by step, spears plunging into bodies, advancing over ground carpeted in bodies to reap Seanchan lives. Some few men in the rear ranks were able to escape, taking to their heels, but their comrades were doomed.

When there were but a few hundred Noren fighters left, the Aiel opened their ranks to allow those few hardy, lucky souls to stream back towards Mordred's lines, a tribute to the valour of a dogged enemy. There was no question of taking wetlanders _gai'shain._

* * *

The conflict was a vortex. An animus of violent energy, a gyre that drew all things to itself, that commanded the eye, that fed off itself.

Above, all but unnoticed was its counterpoint in the heavens. As the sun skulked westwards, the apogee it vacated, a cold blue vault of sky unscarred by cloud, darkened incrementally over that long hour, falling through cobalt and violet to an impenetrable, unnatural darkness that seemed to stand barrier between the celestial realms and the earth, a treacherous, slick expanse of black ice.

A cloud, but there was nothing natural about it, quickening and widening as it slowly revolved until its jagged fringes chased the sun from the skies.

Mordred Paendrag had no interest in what gathered above, though he was one of the few who discerned it. Instead he watched the end of the men of Noren M'Shar, and kept his counsel, his mouth a tight line as he considered his options.

It was far from over. He still had twenty thousand infantry in reserve here, with the possibility of opening Gateways to Seandar to pitch another fifteen thousand men into the fray to either win the battle outright, or cover his retreat if things fell apart completely. Heavy infantry, more _lopar_. A couple hundred _damane,_ too. Light, he had the resources of an entire _continent_ at his fingertips!

Mordred Paendrag could win this battle. There was no real question of that. But there was a limit to what he was prepared to commit. The Sharans would be watching for signs of weakness. As would the Blood. It was no good winning here, if the cost was so exorbitant that it encouraged his High Lords to rebel behind him.

But he wanted to win. Badly.

* * *

Al'Akir was afoot now, as were the majority of the Malkieri warriors. The longsword-wielding Borderlanders plunged deep into the thorny thicket of spears, carrying the battle to the Deathwatch Guard.

Theirs was the advantage of both numbers and arms – broadsword against polearms – al'Akir knew, the longsword having been developed from the ubiquitous arming-sword for the express purpose of fighting one's way into densely-packed spear-infantry and eviscerating them. But the Seanchan elite had superior armour. Al'Akir was beginning to suspect that it was _cuendillar_ -reinforced, since it withstood the heaviest blows he could muster….

 _You're overthinking this, man,_ Al'Akir told himself sternly. _Just focus upon killing them!_

He lunged high at an opponent, anticipating a parry and rolled his wrists, raking back the blade to hamstring the warrior's lead leg, half-swording a parry to step in, smashing the man in the face with the pommel.

"Malkier!" the Red Prince snarled as he drove into the gap between that man's two comrades. _A baker's dozen_. Lizard in the Thornbush took down the pair, one man's throat ripped out, the other's lifeblood pumping from his groin. _Another brace. That makes fifteen._

"My! Sweet! Land!" That was Emrin at his left, each word a swing of his sword as he blocked, feinted, then skewered his opponent up under the armpit. The old man was grinning.

They'd fallen into a rhythm, the pair of them. Al'Akir using his strength and power to disrupt the enemy formation, Emrin using his guile to pick off isolated men. _Light_ , al'Akir thought, _but there was such joy in this a man might weep._ He wondered if his father found it so.

"Malkier!" Another foe sent to meet his Gods. _Sixteen._

"My Sweet Land!" Emrin responded again. Another for him. Light, but Al'Akir began to believe they would actually win through. _Keep your mind on the task, or you won't._

"Ah, _shite_ " There was a world of pain in that brief, muttered exhalation. Al'Akir risked a glance at Emrin, who had uttered the hollow cry. The old man had fallen, taking a Seanchan spear in his guts. A broad-shouldered man stood over him, spear plunging down to finish off the white-haired warrior.

Fury awoke in al'Akir as he leapt to Red Emrin's defence. His longsword reduced the Deathwatch Guardsman's spear to kindling in his hands, and his backswing all but decapitated the man.

He had scant time to spare poor Emrin. Just long enough to read the foreknowledge of his death in the old man's eyes. To see a flicker of sudden alarm upon his countenance, the only warning al'Akir had of his own imminent peril.

Al'Akir spun on his heel, blade rising reflexively in Moon Over Lakes.

It barely was enough to turn aside the headsman's axe. The Power-wrought weapons rang together, the weight of the blow stinging al'Akir's hands through his heavy gauntlets, impelled with an inhuman forcefulness.

The descending axe glanced from al'Akir's blade, striking blue sparks, earthing itself like summer lightning, the broad axehead digging a deep furrow into the clay soil.

Al'Akir looked up at the Ogier Gardener that towered above him. The _alantin's_ broad face was contorted in a bestial snarl of balked rage. The human warrior was forced to leap back, barely avoiding a crosswise swipe of the second axe in the Gardener's left-hand paw. He was outmatched. The roused Ogier was nothing less than a force of nature, bearing down upon him.

A Malkieri armsman ran in, desperately interposing his frail mortal body between his royal charge and the Ogier. A backswung hack of the black steel opened the Borderlander from breastplate to backbone, hurling him a dozen paces through the air as Arganthir, son of Caranthir strode forward, a craggy guardian roused to rude wrath.

The scowling Ogier took al'Akir's hard-swung sword upon the vambrace of his lacquered armour – yew-leaf green, the tree of Death and mourning. The blade scored the lacquer, leaving a muted white line marring the sheen of the smooth surface. _Cuendillar._

Arganthir smiled contemptuously as he advanced, inevitable as fate. Dark lifeblood dripped from his black axes, red as the tree's berries. Double-headed axes with flared blades that seemed as broad as the Doors of Death.

With a grunt, Arganthir kicked al'Akir square in the chest, hurling him from his feet. The Ogier hardly concerned himself with the identity of the man he fought with, the mortal warrior who sought to bar his path. What were the kings of men to him, the measure of their ephemeral lives mere sand running through an hourglass?

No, the Ogier Lictor wanted the standard – crane, lance and crown. It would make a fitting gift to present to his liege lord Mordred Paendrag and the immortal Crystal Throne he represented, the young Emperor a lusty sprig of that ancient tree. It was Arganthir's trust to guard that tree, to tend it and protect it against all enemies without.

And sometimes, to prune from it all that which was unworthy or sickly.

The Malkieri hit the ground, rolled, came up swinging as the _alantin_ bore down upon him, al'Akir's full body weight behind a blow that fell upon the gargantuan creature's knee.

Power-wrought steel ground against _cuendillar_ stone, notching the Malkieri's sword but the Ogier's poleyn went flying as al'Akir's blow severed the leather strapping holding it in place. His second blow fell upon the _alantin's_ bare leg, gnarled and woody, hewing deep. Amber, saplike blood welled from the wound as the Ogier's bark-like skin split under the stroke of the Red Prince's sword.

Arganthir growled in disbelieving fury, swinging both axes crosswise, intending to carve the importunate human warrior in twain like a banquet swan.

Al'Akir bent backwards at the waist as the broad blades clove empty air above his head. He felt the breath of them as they parted the air, as he leapt forward under the Ogier's guard, sword flashing out in The Adder's Kiss, raising his voice in a great, wordless shout of exhortation as his keen sword bit deep.

The lunge planted three foot of sword blade through the _alantin's_ head, spearing up through the Ogier's throat, through his spinal cord and into his brain. Arganthir was dead before he hit the ground, face first, his armour ringing out his ruin.

Al'Akir drew a ragged breath. _Seventeen? Surely an Ogier should count at least double!_

 _No cheating, son._ His father's ever-present voice gruff in his mind's ear. _If you say you will do a thing, then do it, to the letter._

Al'Akir shouldered his longsword, momentarily marking the spot where Red Emrin had fallen. The Malkieri battle standard had advanced apace, the golden crane insigned upon the white linen writhing like a living thing as the banner-cloth snapped in a stiff westerly wind.

The veteran lay under its long shadow, at the battle's beating heart. That was fitting. _May the last embrace of the Mother be your bourne, Red Emrin. Your long watch is done._

Al'Akir turned his attention back to the battle. The Deathwatch Guard were retreating, reluctantly, bloodied but unbowed, and the men of Malkier pressed forward after them, taking ground.

 _Come, away,_ al'Akir demanded of himself, sparing Emrin a last look. _There are more enemies to kill._


	96. Chapter 96: A Bowl Of Winds

**Chapter 96: A Bowl of the Winds**

 _The best plans_ , reflected Mat Cauthon, _required a little insanity to season the mix_.

Absent-mindedly, the Raven Prince rubbed his jaw, as if remembering the curt imprint of Telyn's hand. The Yellow Sister, stranded in Malkier by the war, was a hot-blooded Domani, her ageless face enigmatic – all the better for expressing the mystique and exotic intrigue the women of her country were renowned for.

Hot as ice peppers Telyn's blood might run, but there had been winter's heart expressed upon her sultry countenance when Mat's cheek was slapped.

 _Light,_ Mat winced at the memory, _I do wish women would refrain from doing that!_

Her three Saldean Warders – three! As pretty young men as ever he'd seen, alike as brothers – had stared at Mat haughtily, twisting their moustaches, all three eager to defend their Aes Sedai's honour, should she deem it impugned. Idly, Mat wondered what service Telyn Sedai had rendered to Amyrlin or Ajah for the dispensation allowing her to bond the 'triplets'.

 _Heh._ Well, he should have known better by now. Domani women might wear but a breath of silks, and appear to be falling out of their bodices even so, all but naked to a conservative Two Rivers eye, but they cherished that difference.

Mat's diffident suggestion that some amongst the scattering of Aes Sedai he had should dress as Sea Folk Windfinders for the duration of the battle had fallen upon stony soil indeed. Perhaps it had been a mistake to pitch the idea with a significant nod towards the pretty Domani – well, she _was_ pretty, there was no denying a mere fact – thinking in his madness she would be more tractable than the rest.

He still felt aggrieved, even so. It wasn't even as if Sea Folk women – Windfinders or not – actually went _naked_ on dry land. What passed for custom amongst the seafaring nation amongst themselves was one thing. They had no wish to disport themselves for the prurient gratification of landbound men.

Which was a great pity, all things considered. He knew whereof he spoke, having been granted the Gift of Passage. But that was neither here nor there. It hadn't been the intent of Abell Cauthon's worthy son to talk an Aes Sedai out of her dress – no, not by the Light and his hope of salvation and rebirth! Well, not for his own delectation anyway.

That distinction hadn't made a jot of difference. The Aes Sedai – a baker's dozen, Yellows and Greens, with one lone White representative – who'd been listening to his plans with the sleepy indolence of roosting owls, had cracked open their tawny eyes, ruffled their feathers, flexed their pinions, so to speak, eyeing poor Mat Cauthon like a plump fieldmouse that might be worth a midmorning snack.

All except the lone White, a sloe-eyed Cairhienin, 'small but perfectly formed' as the saying went, a cool drink of milk on a hot summer's day, with her raven hair and aristocratic features. The stamp of the Old Blood was clear to see in the White's countenance, with her aquiline Paendrag nose, her flowing white silks conservatively high-collared, the train of her skirts all but sweeping the ground.

The white silks and satins at her breast were barred like a woodpigeon, at least thirteen narrow horizontal stripes in crimson, accenting her exalted rank and vaunting her House colours. A _Paeron_ Cairhienin. A Redhawk. _Interesting._

Whoever she was, this woman was trouble. Despite her demure appearance and conservative apparel, the Redhawk Lady looked _more_ than intrigued in his proposal. Oh, Light burn his soul, _Daes Dae'mar_ probably intimated all manner of things. Well, he hadn't meant _anything_ by it!

Tuon had bestowed a very interesting look upon her distant kinswoman for her presumption. Unambiguous malice glittered in her eyes. The conclusion of _Daes Dae'mar_ written in them. A dance of swords, when only blood could wash out the stain upon one's honour.

His proposal had been received more favourably by the Taardad Wise Ones, which was a jest worthy of the Creator himself. Aiel were notoriously touchy, and there was no knowing whether his madcap idea would violate some stricture of _ji_ or _toh,_ which was why he'd pitched it to the Aes Sedai first. Better a slapped face than struck through by spears!

Instead, it had been received with a brief gust of delighted laughter that had him reaching for his hat, and a flurry of what looked suspiciously like Maiden hand-talk. Many of them, like Bair and Amys bestowed a fond glance upon him, the kind reserved for the sort of mischievous younger brother whose pranks walked the precarious line between having his hair fondly tousled and his ear firmly twisted for him.

It had been Aviendha who had answered for them, speaking with a degree of gravitas that had surprised Mat, a little. "There are some amongst us who feel that such a subterfuge is unworthy, as spying is, a blemish upon one's _toh._ Most of us feel that, on the contrary, playing a grand jest upon an overweening enemy gains us much _ji,_ like taking a strong man _gai'shain_.

There is no consensus, except that even the more … scrupulous .. amongst us feel the possible loss of _toh_ is negligible. But _toh_ is all. Therefore, we leave the question to each woman's conscience, under the Light."

The outcome was that about one hundred Wise Ones had been amenable. From amongst them, Mat selected two dozen women at random to pose as Windfinders, and another five older women of character and dignity – Sorilea amongst them – to take the part of Wavemistresses.

The Bowl appeared to be an ancient thing, with the gravitas of the long years since the Breaking lying heavy upon it, riming the glass's smooth patina like ice. It had that permanence about it, couched in a seeming fragility. A shallow bowl a yard in breadth, appearing fashioned from some vitreous material, an opaque black glass, the sun through its surface appearing like a memory of light seen from fathomless ocean depths.

Of glass, the Bowl of the Winds appeared to be fashioned. It had indeed been glass once, but a matrix of the One Power had aligned it into a nameless substrate that was near as hard as _cuendillar_. Glass that could notch hard-swung steel.

At a first glance, the black glass seemed slick and smooth, a treacherous surface of black ice, unmarked and still. But its obsidian beguiled the watcher's eye, darkened it, and then its depths seemed to stir and move under their regard, a grand conjuration, revolving like a wheel. Or perhaps it remained still, the unmoved mover, and the world moved for it, pinwheeling, cast through the constellations.

With the battle in full cry, a Full Circle – _Asha'man_ , Aes Sedai and Wise Ones together with his 'Windfinders' – had come together, privily, while the watchful eyes of their foes were drawn elsewhere.

The two halves of the One Power – a perilous ocean of _saidar_ and an angry cosmere of _saidin_ , a sky riven by pillars of Fire and lightning – had met at their horizon asymptote in the Bowl of the Winds, as Melaine, reeling under an enormity of the Power, bending like a reed under the gale, melded the flows, setting a guttering pentagram of white fire upon the Bowl's surface.

Thrice, the Wise One passed the flows through the solid surface of the bowl, inverting the weaves, so none save them could see.

The Power had awoken, the Bowl ringed by a marching sea, the horns of the deep sounding as glacial waves of _saidar_ reared up, their crests spuming in white foam as the woken wind carved them. A driving tempest roiling a pent sky, black as a _kraken's_ ink, roused to wrath.

Above the Great Circle, the day sky began to dull, taking on a sullen cast matching the dark, beating heart of the Bowl of the Winds. At first, the progress was imperceptible, with the sun in apogee, its light forcing through the drawing gloom, but as the sun arced westward, baleful cyclonic clouds condensed overhead from a virgin sky.

Snow began to fall, soft white flakes, first singly, then in flurries, sweeping, swirling as the Great Circle wove Weather through the Bowl of the Winds.

The straining flows, rough-fibered hawsers of _saidin_ and _saidar_ , all but ripped themselves from Melaine's hands, as she shivered fitfully, and the bowl pulsed once, twice, thrice, before vomiting a ragged column of black fire skywards, issuing a glassy, yet thunderous, peal, and the Bowl of the Winds fell dark and dead.

Mat nodded to Tuon. It was time.

The Raven Prince raised his voice into the shocked silence that followed that ominous crack of thunder. "DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION YET, SON OF MINE?" His voice, Power-amplified, resonated with bluff good humour.

A long pause. Then Mordred Paendrag answered him, his augmented reply rasping steel. "YOU HAVE IT. MOMENTARILY. BE BRIEF, FATHER."

"I HAVE THE HONOUR TO POSSESS A SMALL KEEPSAKE. A GIFT FROM A WOMAN," Mat continued, with a confiding chuckle, "VERY UNGALLANT OF ME, I KNOW, BUT ONE FINDS IT SO HARD TO SAY 'NO' TO A WOMAN LIKE CADSUANE MELAIDHRIN! THIS TRIFLE IS THE 'BOWL OF THE WINDS'."

Mat's voice hardened, crackled with distortion. "I'M _DONE_ PLAYING AROUND. IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED, SON, BUT I'M TELLING YOU NOW. BACK OFF! QUIT THIS FIELD, OR I'LL DESTROY YOU ALL WITH THE BOWL OF THE WINDS!

BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO TAKE MY WORD FOR IT. ASK YOUR _DAMANE_ AND _SUL'DAM_ WHETHER THEY FELT THAT! I WILL WAGER THEY ARE SOILING THEMSELVES IN FEAR."

Mordred paused a long moment, clearly consulting with his underlings. "SO YOU SAY, FATHER, SO YOU SAY. _IF_ YOU TRULY POSSESS THE BOWL, YOU MUST KNOW THAT YOU CAN'T USE THE BOWL LIKE THAT. PERHAPS YOU CAN RAISE A STORM IN THAT MANNER. BUT YOU CANNOT TARGET US SO SELECTIVELY. YOU'LL DESTROY ALL OF US!"

The Son of Battles grinned broadly. "THERE YOU HAVE IT! IF WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE ANYWAY, WHY SHOULD WE NOT SHARE YOUR WONDERFUL COMPANY IN WAKING FROM THE DREAM?"

Mat paused. "OF COURSE, SON, THERE'S A THIRD OPTION OTHER THAN YOUR WITHDRAWAL OR MUTUALLY-ASSURED DESTRUCTION. A DUEL OF CHAMPIONS. WINNER TAKES ALL."

Mat took a deep breath before resuming. "YOU AGAINST ME. HOW ABOUT IT? IF YOU HAVEN'T THOUGHT ABOUT THE IDEA, I'M A FEATHER DANCER! ME AGAINST YOU. OR AGAINST ANY CHAMPION YOU CARE TO NAME, IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE ONIONS FOR IT YOURSELF, BOY."

Mordred's retort was scornful. "OR I COULD SIMPLY CALL YOUR BLUFF. YOU DON'T HAVE THE BOWL, DO YOU, FATHER? THE _ATHA'AN MIERE_ HAVE CUSTODY OF IT, SO IT IS SAID, AND WHAT THEY POSSSESS, THEY DON'T GIVE UP."

Mat only smiled, opening his hands ruefully. "YOU HAVE BEEN MISLED, MY LAD. I HAVE ANY NUMBER OF AES SEDAI AT MY BECK AND CALL, ALL WILLING TO ATTEST THAT THE WHITE TOWER IS CUSTODIAN OF THAT OBJECT. INCLUDING MY SISTER, BODEWHIN CAUTHON OF THE YELLOW AJAH. AS YOU MUST SURELY KNOW, AES SEDAI DO NOT LIE.

WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT, HAVE YOU MET MY WAVEMISTRESSES AND WINDFINDERS? CHARMING LADIES ALL. I'LL INTRODUCE YOU, IF YOU LIKE! STRANGELY, THEY FEEL LITTLE AFFECTION FOR THE RAVEN EMPIRE, SINCE THEY BORE THE BRUNT OF THE CASUALTIES IN THE _CORENNE._

 _Let him chew on that,_ Mat thought, knowing that Mordred would twist himself into knots with the implications. Maybe the White Tower owned the bowl, or maybe the Sea Folk did, and the White Tower didn't want to acknowledge the fact. Either way, both interested parties were very much in attendance, joined in enterprise.

"THE BOWL OF THE WINDS IS HERE." Mat stated, flatly. "YOUR _SUL'DAM_ COULD NOT HAVE FAILED TO FEEL IT. A SMALL TASTE! AN APPETIZER BEFORE THE MAIN COURSE!

SO GO AHEAD, MORDRED. CALL MY BLUFF. SEE WHAT HAPPENS! EVEN IF YOU WERE RIGHT, YOUR SOLDIERS WOULD FOREVER KNOW THAT WHILE THEY WERE PREPARED TO LAY DOWN THEIR LIVES FOR YOU, YOU WERE NOT WILLING TO VENTURE YOUR OWN FOR THEM."

A long, long pause ensued, as Mat struggled to maintain his insouciant façade, knowing that the likelihood was that he would be being closely observed using the Power.

Then Mordred deigned to respond. The Seanchan Emperor's voice was unruffled. "VERY WELL, FATHER. I ACCEPT YOUR CHALLENGE."

 _Oh, Light,_ Mat fretted. _Boy sounds damnably eager._


	97. Chapter 97: A Dance Of Ravens

**Chapter 97: A Dance of Ravens**

Father faced son over the blood-fouled field.

The bruised sky boiled with carrion birds grown bold, who no longer feared the men who had set their hellish table replete before them. A larder of offal and human meat on the bone, lying in the frigid water for their delectation. Overweening, they staked their claim in the fallow ground between the two armies.

Mordred's steady advance scattered a covey of ravens from their feast, and the glossy black birds took indignant flight about him, furnishing him momentarily with an outstretched archangel's wings of iridescent jet. A Thakan'dar angel, in the wan light of a winter's sun.

Their beating wings blurred, feathered pinions shedding a spray of water droplets. A wealth of diamonds that blazed with sudden intensity, burning a lucent ideogram into Mat's retinas, a Rohrsach of unknown meaning, before the waveform collapsed, the birds scattering to the four winds.

The ravens' ululating croaks, bitter as memory. _We will return,_ they said, staking their claim upon the living and the dead alike. _To take our portion._

There was a bare sword in Mordred Paendrag's right hand, long and dark. It was unsheathed. He had come to fight, not talk.

The Seanchan Emperor walked with a considered grace, head inclined slightly, as if in pensive thought so that his stylized helm foreshadowed his face. A helm whose ornamental visor was fashioned into a raven's slashing bill. His lightweight armour matched it, a sleek raven's coat, an articulated armour which substituted fine-filigreed feathers of jet-black steel for commonplace chainmail links or scales.

The Raven Prince considered the weapon his son bore. An unusual choice. Almost archaic. His _shinai_ was a wooden sword. A training weapon, a slightly-curved length of smooth ebony.

Reflexively, Mat hefted his _ashanderai_ , setting the polearm into absent motion, a lazy, blurring loop in his right fist, like Thom Merrilyn making a silver coin dance between his knuckles. His fidgeting telegraphed coltish nervousness to his adversary, Mat knew, but he didn't mind that. Instincts took over when battle commenced, and blood ran true, as he had cause to know.

The Raven Emperor paused, taking guard. His frigid demeanour at odds with Mat's keyed-up impatience, Mordred Paendrag raised a hand in salute, pushing up the keen blade of his visor with a steel-gauntleted hand. Penetrating eyes invigilated Mat, not a whit less sharp.

"Father" Mordred greeted him.

"Son." Mat acknowledged.

 _Daes Dae'mar_ in two words. Mordred playing upon his feelings. Seeking to unsettle him. Two could play at that game. "Glad you saw sense, boy." Mat jibed. "No need for any more of your brave men to die needlessly over a family quarrel." A crass reminder of how many men Mordred had fed into the mincer. A blow aimed squarely at the young General's pride.

Mordred's expression darkened appreciably. _That struck near the mark._

The younger man paused momentarily, regaining mastery over himself, favouring Mat with a wintry smile. "Indeed. Now that we are alone here, Father – just you and I and the ravens – tell me this: It was a bluff, was it not? That you had possession of the Bowl of the Winds?"

"That rather depends upon your interpretation!" Mat returned Mordred's smile with interest. "Everyone – even the Seanchan – know the Aes Sedai cannot lie. So nobody thought to look behind the truth for the facts when the Amyrlin declared that the White Tower had possession of a great _ter'angreal_ called the Bowl of the Winds.

Which rather elegantly sidestepped a falsehood, I think. There was nothing to stop the Aes Sedai taking a minor weather _ter'angreal_ – a flawed attempt to copy the original by Queen Elayne in point of fact – and calling it whatever they damn well pleased."

"So the bowl you showed me …" Mordred began.

"Was the copy. _A_ so-called 'Bowl of the Winds', referred to as such by all Aes Sedai amongst themselves – therefore making the name germane – but not _the_ Bowl, if you catch my drift. It was not in the interest of the White Tower to widely acknowledge that they had given up such a renowned object of the Power to another, you may be sure.

The facsimile can indeed effect some localised meteorological phenomena, but nothing on the scale or duration of the original…. Son, it gives me great pleasure to tell me you've been had! The more so, because I am reliably informed that the original takes quite some time to effect said changes – days if not weeks in order to brew up the kind of storm I threatened you with! – and last but not least, because even if I possessed the power to destroy all of us together, I would not do so.

By the by," Mat continued, in an offhand tone that belied the serious intent behind his words, "the original Bowl is in the possession of the Sea Folk, I do believe – a fact I feel quite comfortable disclosing to you, Mordred, in case you should ever take a fancy to conquering Tremalking or any other Sea Folk haven – I fear you might find the voyage discommoding. Particularly the long sojourn at the bottom of the Aryth Ocean that would most likely conclude the attempt."

"Did you come here merely to gloat at your own cleverness, Father? Or to fight?" Mordred snapped, the veneer of civility wearing thin indeed.

Mat sighed heavily. "To fight – seeing as you don't have the sense to do otherwise." The Raven Prince turned his head in profile like his namesake, casting a sidelong look over his son with his one good eye.

"To fight and to win! I see you have equipped yourself as Jearom, with your wooden sword. Unfortunately for you, in one of my many prior lives, _I_ was the farmer with the quarterstaff who blotted the Blademaster's escutcheon." Mat bluffed with a straight face, hefting his _ashanderai_ meaningfully. _When in doubt, bluff, bluff and bluff once again._ A maxim to live by.

That was pure Mat Cauthon.

Mordred raised an eyebrow, and this time it was Mat who felt a sudden misgiving. "If that is not just another one of your outlandish verbal peregrinations, Father, then the misfortune is yours, truly. Perhaps _you_ should have studied the forms of challenge before you tendered one.

Since you issued the challenge, it falls unto myself to select the weapon class. I choose _unarmed combat_ , Father. Fists and feet. Of course, you may withdraw, if you so choose. Concede defeat."

Mat grimaced. Perhaps Aemon al'Caar with his Warder-training in unarmed combat might have stood half a chance against his son. But not Mat Cauthon.

He was a novice at fisticuffs, his experience limited to a full and frank exchange of views with Wil al'Seen half a lifetime ago, in which he had given a black eye and received a fat lip by way of fair trade. A skirmish occasioned by an ungallant comment Wil had made about Mat's sister, if he remembered aright.

Hardly fitting preparation for a brutal fight to the death, with the fate of kingdoms and nations hanging in the balance.

"Wait!" A commanding voice cut through Mat trying his damnedest to find wriggle-room in his predicament. Father and son turned together, united in surprise, to regard the person who had the temerity to interrupt their verbal sparring.

Mordred was the first to recover, his face darkening in declared rage, saturnine. "Mother!" he hissed between gritted teeth. "So good of you to join us! Be so kind as to tell me what the deuce you mean by coming between us, and having done so, step aside. This is a matter of honour between me and him."

" _I_ shall fight as Maitrim's champion" Tuon declared in a loud, clear voice, refusing to so much as look at her son as she took her place by Mat's right hand. She looked as angry as … as Nynaeve, Mat thought, for want of a better simile, the sleeves of her mourning-blue silks rolled up to her elbows, long outer skirts divested in favour of more practical apparel – what Mat considered a rather becoming short skirt – leaving her feet and legs bare to knee-height. Where her son's anger was black ice, Tuon's wrath was furnace heat that inflamed her cheeks, filled her eyes with passion.

Mat turned to Tuon, mouth agape, briefly lost for words. "Have you lost your mind?" he demanded of her, finally. "This is a fight to the bloody death. No place for…" he tailed off.

Tuon gave him a fond look. "No place for a woolhead who knows about as much about fist-fighting as I do about the rear-end of a sheep, I think you meant to say, husband dearest. Don't fret. I've got this well in hand."

Mat said nothing, but his appalled expression eloquently expressed his dread for her safety, commingled with injured pride. _Men._ Fiercely, Tuon gripped the collar of his shirt, addressing him in a imtimate whisper intended for his ears alone."Knotai, how many times have you risked your life for mine? _Dozens_ of times, I should think. How _dare_ you disrespect my love by trying to forbid that I hazard my person for you likewise?!"

Mat smiled a humourless gallows smile at that. His face took on a ghastly pallor. "I see the truth in what you say but I don't have to like it. I hate it.

I hate all of this!" he cried out, in anger and sudden grief, dashing a fist against his temple. " _I_ could bear to fight him, but to see you and he … No." He turned to Mordred, a beseeching look in his eye for the first time. "Son, I'm asking you… No. I'm begging you. Please don't do this, for the Light's sake."

"Then she should withdraw" Mordred answered him, dispassionate. "I have no more taste for this … unseemly drama … than you do, but I tell you I will not give ground."

"I will not yield, either." Tuon shook her head obstinately. "By my soul I will not. I cannot! I would liefer let you kill me, my son, rather than raise my hand to you in anger. But Seanchan owns me, and it is for her sake I take guard, not mine own."

"Then you shall die recreant, Mother, and your treason with you. Your blood upon your own head." Mordred declared, and from the stony silence that fell between the two, the matter appeared to be concluded.

* * *

The two protagonists – the Emperor and his _marath'damane_ mother – readied themselves for their duel. There was no marshal of the lists to judge the contest, but the men and women of both armies drew near in the centre of the field, where they stood in respectful silence, as if appreciating the gravity of the moment.

Yet all kept their hands ready upon the hilts of their swords, upon their spear-hafts, ready to take up arms once more should the armistice be broken.

Tuon was ready quickly. She needed but a few moments, with Mat's assistance, removing her lacquered nail extensions, tightly taping up her hands to the wrists with long strips of linen cloth.

Grimacing, Tuon made compact fists from her small hands and to Mat, they suddenly didn't look so delicate any more. They seemed to him to be hard white beach pebbles. The kind of sea-smoothed stone a slinger uses to take down an armoured man from afar with a single blow.

Tuon turned away from Mat, clasping her arms above her head, stretching, before shadow-boxing, firing staccato bursts of straight lefts and rights that snapped the silk cloth of her dress taut. Mat could hear her focused breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

He let her get on with it. Everyone had their own rituals for single combat. Well, those who survived and throve at the practice long enough to make a habit of it, anyway, the Raven Prince amended.

 _She'll be fine,_ Mat tried to tell himself. _Light, look at her! All that training, all that fighting, surviving assassins and Grey Men and the Light alone knows who else, and my Tuon doesn't exactly have the prize-fighter's stereotypical cauliflower ears, pug nose, or any scars worth speaking of. That must mean she's bloody good._

Mat looked over at his son. _Of course, you could say exactly the same considering Mordred's clean-cut appearance._ The young man looked hard, focused and ready.

Was it a betrayal of his son, that he wanted Tuon to survive so desperately? Mat didn't know. A part of him – his Old Blood heritage doubtless – even wanted to see Mordred pay the reckoning for his betrayals at Tuon's hands. To see him battered senseless and stretched out cold. But not killed. Never that. The Light forbid!

 _Kick his arse, Tuon._ Mat willed wholeheartedly. _Beat the mortal Shai'tan out of him! He has it coming. Even I can see that with one eye! But don't die on me. And don't kill him, either._ Mat's rebellious stomach clenched as he fought not to throw up every meal he had ever eaten at the very prospect.

The terrifying thing was that both Tuon and Mordred came from a harder school than he. Mercy was barely a concept in either party's martial lexicon.

The likelihood was that one of the two people that Mat loved wholeheartedly was going to die. Right here, right now, while he watched the other one beat them to death. What that said about him – let alone the pair of them – he didn't rightly know. It didn't change the simple fact that he loved them both, to distraction, and was powerless to save either from themselves or each other.

Mat wasn't a devout man by inclination, but there was a time and a place. A simple soldier's prayer filled his heart, words he dared not let breach his lips, lest they distract Tuon from her deadly business. _Father of the Heavenly Lights, You who does not change like shifting shadows. Save them both. The pair of them. That's all I ask._

Mordred meantime had stripped off his helm, his greatcloak, and his raven-feather mail-coat, and finally his linen-quilted gambeson, divesting them carelessly in an untidy pile upon the ground to stand bare-chested.

The Raven Emperor laid his sword down with greater care, on top of the pile, near to hand in case of treachery, waving away a hovering _da'covale_ who sought to remove armour, apparel and arms from the scene.

Mordred turned to Mat, raising his voice so all assembled could hear. "Men know you as a man of honour, Maitrim Cauthon, Raven Prince. Will you stand surety for this … _marath'damane_ you have chosen to take your part against me, in this wager of the body?"

Contempt shaded the Emperor's slurred voice. There was not a trace of the Two Rivers argot remaining in the diction of Mordred Paendrag. "Any channelling or witchery upon her part will constitute a violation of the truce, as you well should know. Are we agreed?"

Savagely, Mat grounded his _ashanderai_ blade-first into the ground, where it quivered. The truth was, he didn't trust himself to keep the peace with the weapon in his hand. _The blade itself incites to violence._ He folded his arms across his chest ere he deigned to reply to his son. "I do so pledge, under the Light, by my hope of salvation and rebirth" the Raven Prince grated.

The sun could not bear to see their shame, turning his face away from the spectacle of mother fighting son, obscuring himself behind a pallid bank of cloud.

Mordred came out fighting. He led with a low side-kick aimed at Tuon's knee, and as she stepped aside nimbly, her delicate bare foot casting a spray of muddy water, he planted his lead leg, telescoping left hand flashing towards her face.

Tuon ducked into the shot, palms of her hands flat against her forehead as she interposed her left elbow to blunt the force of Mordred's stinging left, trying to break the fragile bones of his closed fist against the point of her elbow.

Mordred snarled, ignoring the pain of his bruised knuckles, firing a right cross that Tuon took upon her right forearm, then unloading a dazzling combination salvo that was impeccably checked by the angles and blades of her elbows and forearms.

He hauled off, long right hand whipping into Tuon's left kidney, making her arch her back in pain, followed with an attempted leg-sweep that the older woman hopped back from, grimacing from a numbed shin where their lower legs had banged dully together.

Mordred tried to lever his reach advantage, firing off another hard left jab that he intended to close Tuon down behind, this time angled for her upper body.

Tuon grabbed his arm at the wrist with her right hand, stepping in to thunder a full force left elbow strike into Mordred's solar plexus. Mordred went down hard into the ankle-deep water, managing to skitter away like a roach as she came after him.

The young man scrambled to his feet, mud-spattered, spitting blood from the corner of his mouth. He favoured Tuon with a malevolent look that promised immediate retribution.

If the knockdown had impaired Mordred's capacity to fight, the Emperor showed no sign of it, appearing to thrive upon the pain. He was undeterred, still the aggressor, stalking Tuon, his footwork fluid as he appeared to glide over the surface of the shallow water, darting in to throw circumspect flurries of blows before circling away.

By contrast, Tuon at bay was almost motionless, holding a narrow, upright fighting stance, her guard hands held high and away from her, equidistant from her body, arms almost fully extended. She did not waste energy. She responded to Mordred's combinations with parsimony, single hard blows delivered with her fists, elbows and knees. Solid sweeps that hobbled a leg, concussive punches to the body, whiplash elbow strikes to the head and torso when Mordred attempted infighting.

His guileful hands attempted pressure point attacks to nerve points and knifehand strikes aimed at vulnerable areas, only to be driven off repeatedly by Tuon's heavy hands. Whenever she connected, Mordred went reeling backwards under the punishing force of blows driven by her piston arms and teak-tough legs.

Tuon managed to put him down again, sweeping his legs from under him, and for a third successive time with a snap backfist to the temple that Mordred failed to read, but neither really hurt him or even gave him pause.

Tuon was the older combatant, feeling every day of her forty-two years. She was waning fast under the wintry sun, sheened in sweat, but Mordred was indefatigable.

The young warrior had gained his second wind. His blows were a remorseless siege, opening a deep trench under her right eye, splitting her lips, tattooing her ribcage. Tuon's nose had been broken early in the fight during a savage exchange by a raking bear-paw strike. That was the worst of the damage she'd accrued thus far, leaving her labouring for the oxygen she needed to keep fighting effectively.

However many times Tuon knocked Mordred from his feet, he simply picked himself up and resumed afresh. Her son was simply too young, too strong and if she was honest, too well-trained for her to handle.

She was dimly aware of her Knotai watching, appalled at the internecine battery they inflicted upon each other without pause. His hat in his hands, worrying at it restlessly, long fingers tearing the felt apart in his anxiety.

She could not spare the energy to worry about him.

Mordred prowled with the menace of a stalking panther. Her son's confidence chilled Tuon's heart. It chipped away at her self-belief as surely as his punches and kicks. He was picking her apart now. Forcing the pace, making her fight at a remorseless tempo that she could not sustain for much longer.

The more tired Tuon became, the more mistakes she made as she pressed, trying to finish the fight. Mordred made her pay dearly for that license. He dropped her with a cleaving axe-kick which smashed through her guard, almost breaking her collar-bone in the process. The weight of the blow forced her to her knees. Tuon gamely struggled to rise.

He hit her with a merciless roundhouse kick to the ribs. She traded with a check-hook to the jaw, and a rising knee to the kidney. Either blow would have finished most fights, but Mordred didn't even seem to register them. In fact, she seemed to lose by the exchange. It was like fighting a man carved from wood. A golem, hewn from living stone.

Mordred's eyes were serene, their pupils dilated as if under the influence of narcotics. Those remote eyes assessed her without compassion. Empty eyes that could not be read for tells, nor reasoned with. Eyes devoid of regret or remorse.

Her son fought with the anger, privation and loneliness of two decades driving his trip-hammer blows, whereas a mother's guilt and regret weighed Tuon down. Shackled her. She could not match him. An Empress's zeal was not enough against such reckless hate.

 _Saidar_ opened its petals to her, a lambent flower unfolding in the blackness that was the _ko'di_. Offering succour. Strength. Tuon fought to reject the Power's ambrosial embrace as hard as she strove against Mordred. She would not stoop so low.

The Void fractured from the inside out, a vessel of Sea Folk porcelain shattering upon a stone floor. The full awareness of her body's agony it contained poured out like wildfire – her sprung ribs, numerous contusions, a cracked wrist and orbital bone – setting her senses ablaze with numinous agony.

Tuon refused to cry out. To let so much as a breath of agony cross her lips. Even now, _sei'mosiev_ was all she had to hold her together. She plastered a confident smile upon her lips as she staggered forward to meet Mordred, who was undeceived, appraising her like a slaughterman.

When the end came, it was a surprise to both of them. Exhausted, barely able to raise her arms, Tuon attempted to clinch.

Mordred shrugged her off like a rag-doll, propping her up for a left hook – and with an expression of surprise and pain that might have been comical in another situation, he caught his ankle upon the submerged body of a corpse, stumbling forward gracelessly.

The point of his chin made an irresistible target, and Tuon put all of her remaining strength into a raging uppercut, which lifted Mordred from his feet, laying him flat upon his back.

Tuon tottered forward, fully expecting Mordred to shrug this off, too, fully intending to go to ground and try and choke the life from him where he lay. _Whatever it took._

There was no need. Mordred's eyes were closed. Mercifully for both of them, he was unconscious.

Tuon stood over her son's body, shaking, before falling to her knees in exhaustion. Tears blurred her vision, occluding Mordred's loved, hated face from her as she bowed her head in shame and triumph.


	98. Chapter 98: Word Of A King

**Chapter 98: Word of a King**

 _Perhaps,_ allowed Maitrim Cauthon, _it had been a mistake to come._

Two Deathwatch Guards bracketed him, one at each shoulder. A guard of honour – it would have been unseemly to clap the Raven Prince, the hero of Merrilor, in irons.

Still, the distinction he enjoyed was singular. He was free to circulate among the throng of those assembled, but he was warded well, his jailors picked men, expert with sword and lance. They responded with civility to Mat's attempts at badinage, but these were men of a dour stamp, his wit and charm finding but stony soil. Neither his famously glib tongue or legerdemain was of any use to him in either case. They had Tuon, and therefore they had him.

High Lady Deiria had chosen his companions only too well. She shimmered in white silks and _streith_ which set off her willowy figure and alabaster skin to perfection, lounging in a tall-backed chair of sung wood, white Aldael oak.

The High Lady's indolent demeanour, flocked by fawning courtiers, suggested an audience with royalty. Her fully shorn head shouted it from the rooftops, as she reclined in her throne, slippers kicked off and her bare feet teasing the flanks of a massive _torm_ , scaled black and gold, who coiled in heavy repose before her.

Deiria Aladon Tanreall might be taking her ease in her chambers after an afternoon's falconry, a leather gauntlet upon her left fist, and a haughty peregrine falcon, hooded, rattling his pinions perched upon it, its jesses held tight in that acquisitive fist. High Lady Deiria's falcon Dafydd was a famous bird, a living sigil of the Aladon House.

Since Deiria's person had been so crudely assaulted by the baseborn woman, Beca Koukal, that men named Surehand, the peregrine accompanied High Lady Deiria wherever she went. Nobody knew the how of it, but the harrier bird's solitary, wild heart owned a singular devotion to his mistress.

The falcon was the instrument of her wrath. Should the High Lady find but civility and admiration from her coterie, why, all would be well with the world, and the bird slept upon her fair hand.

But let gentle Deiria be roused into wrath, then she would fain unhood Dafydd, and let the peregrine take in the room with swift circumferences of his noble head, proud eyes seeking out those who caused his mistress her grief. And let the miscreant utter further insult, then the great bird would bring redress, maiming the offender with his talons!

Such was High Lady Deiria, daughter of Turak, of the blood of the Hawk by the line of Luthair.

If one stood where Mat did, and turned upon one's heel to describe a panorama of the huge, vaulted chamber, as he did, the points of the sundial were marked by a dozen similar congregations as High Lady Deiria enjoyed. In each place, a candidate was ensconced in state, each shaven-headed, surrounded by courtiers, _sul'dam, damane, da'covale, so'feia_ and armsmen.

The centre of the chamber was thronged by Blood and High Blood nobles, raising a hubbub like men at market as they percolated between the armed camps. And it was a marketplace, Mat Cauthon understood, where the currency was land and title and advancement, and the fealty of great houses the produce being bought and sold.

Such was the King's Witan, a custom of antiquity, of Shandalle that was, the land where Artur Paendrag Tanreall had been the thirty-eighth and last monarch. The King's Witan had been held here for eight hundred years – a great circular hall of stone columns whose vaulted ceiling was deliberately left unfinished, the ribs and arches high above, framing the skies, open to the elements. The conclave was meant to be held under the Light, and so it was, despite the frigid weather and an overcast sky, which dripped dismal rain on those there assembled.

The Witan was the means whereby the next Emperor or Empress would be chosen by acclamation of his or her peers when no clear successor was exigent. Of course, the custom had been all but forgotten, its wisdom set aside in favour of assassination, regicide and civil war.

But even the warlike Seanchan would liefer avoid armed internecine strife after the fifteen-year Reclamation War, remembering both the hardships occasioned and the brief years of prosperity and rebuilding that followed it. Even the most hard-bitten warlord amongst them saw the wisdom of choosing the latter over the former.

That didn't mean they wouldn't fight, if the Witan failed to achieve consensus. And Mat knew in his bones that there was no agreement to be found. No candidate with the popular mandate, none with a superlative advantage in arms or fortune, none with a clear-cut claim by lineage. The Forsaken Semirhage had done her work all too well, hacking and burning the great tree of Hawkwing's line back to a single viable branch.

After Tuon and Mordred Paendrag – both of Luthair's unbroken line, both banished upon forfeiture of death – the rest held no clear advantage by birth.

Mat was no candidate. The Raven Prince was an outsider, though not a negligible force in his own right, as the Banner-General of _Shen en Calhar_ – an army that mustered two full legions and the means for their resource and upkeep.

Ordinarily, Mat Cauthon would have been one of the wooed, as much for his martial talent as for the loyalty of the Band. But all men knew he was Fortuona's creature, and as her stock had fallen, so had his. To them he was a _marath'damane_ 's thrall, a foreign adventurer, a mercenary. A great man still, but the former outweighed the latter in Seanchan eyes.

Mat sighed as he received their judgement: _There goes one who flew too near the sun. His borrowed plumage of raven feathers melting under the day's glare._ There was some hate, some pity in those eyes, but no support to be gleaned whatsoever.

He was on his own.

And of course, he had the abiding enmity of Deiria Aladon, who held him responsible not only for Beca Koukal's actions and his son's, but also for the death of her father, Turak, cut down by Rand al'Thor in Ebou Dar.

Mat had been there, been one of the witnesses to Rand earning the right to bear a Blademaster's herons that day. .. Well, in point of fact, he'd been rather preoccupied at the time, laying about him for all he was worth. But he'd been there, fighting alongside Rand, and that was what counted, in Deiria's eyes.

Mat shivered under the High Lady's regard. Turak had been both cold and cruel. Deiria was reputedly worse, her malice a byword. Her smile was a knife's welcome, as she bade him forward with ironic civility in respect of his borrowed rank. A position Mat was prepared to leverage for all it was worth.

"Hile, Raven Prince!" she addressed him, for all the world as if the Wheel had not turned since the death of Manetheren, and Mat hid his contempt for her airs, offering her a shallow bow – Low Blood to High, hand holding his hat to his head. Keeping one's head covered was the epitome of meekness, here. A gesture of utmost respect, bordering upon submission. Across the Aryth, such an obeisance before monarch or High Lord would earn a flogging, at best.

Different customs.

"Hile, liege kinswoman" Mat ventured, and Deiria's dark eyes flashed a warning. _Careful, Mat. You stand upon thin ice._ Yet it was true. Had not Aemon, King of Manetheren stood equal in rank and dignity to the watered wine that was the True Blood of little Shandalle?

He owed Aemon that much to say it, and it was a pleasure besides to see the frozen anger in this woman's eyes. _A dangerous way for a man to amuse himself._

His guards went so far as to actually shove him forward, where he stood beside Tuon, who while kneeling, shielded and collared before the High Lady, expressed an ineffable dignity that the woman on the throne could not match, even though a weave of Air forced her head down to the floor, that she might be held _sei'mosiev_. That noble bearing had earned her the blood upon her back, scourging whips of Air, wielded by strong-backed _sul'dam_.

Tuon wore the collar and the marks of the lash like badges of honour. _Tai'shar Seandar._

Mat blanched with a terrible anger to see her so. _Bide your time,_ he told himself as his hands knotted into fists by his sides. _You still have one card left to play._

Where in the Light was that damnable boy? He had sworn he would be here, come Hell or high water!

Mat forced a tight-lipped smile upon his face. A terrible smile that barely contained ruth or a gentleman's disinterest. "You look well, Lady Deiria. A spring snowdrop, in truth, after a hard winter's frost. Though I fear, your hairstyle ill-becomes you. I daresay, you should have your stylist whipped – and not your Empress!" Mat proposed, with an ironic gallantry that won a brave, battered smile from Tuon.

Deiria's smile was a chisel blade poised above an obstinate knot of wood. "Have a care, _Cauthon_ , have a care" she breathed. "Some may find your levity engaging. A jester's jape. I find it not to my taste."

"I own that I am a wretched creature, High Lady. Yet the Creator plays his little jests, and sometimes, I fancy, I am a small part of his" Mat owned, brightening as he marked a well-known countenance amongst the High Lady's _da'covale,_ the bevy of somewhat-handsome young men with whom Deiria was reputed to dally. A sunny smile, thoroughly discomforting Deiria who had no idea what the Raven Prince found amusing, knowing only that it could only augur ill for her.

 _Why, fancy that,_ Mat thought, stroking his chin as he regarded the _da'covale_ meaningfully, as if the young man was an _ashanderai_ , apt to his hand. _Each to their own, but I own the High Lady's taste in bedfellows to be .. curious._

Curious it might have been, her proclivities proved an unlooked-for boon, as Mat took in the jug-eared, gap-toothed gamin, with his round shoulders and expressive eyes. _Heh, Olver, you beauty!_

There was something in Olver's right hand, a curious object for a _da'covale_ to bear, but somehow lending the young man – for so he was, a shrewd, weathered dignity, as he cast off the submissive bearing of a servant to stand straight-backed, with the spine of the soldier he truly was, among sundry other talents:

A master of disguise. The intermediary between _Shen en Calhar_ and Mat's Magpies. The victor of _Tarmon Gai'don_ – and the custodian of the Horn of Valere, which lay in his hand in unassuming might, a wild kine's horn, bound about with brass that gleamed with that metal's honest polish.

Deiria's jaw dropped as without a word, her concubine walked straight past her without so much as a look for his Mistress to take his true station at Mat Cauthon's left hand, his face bearing an impenetrable expression.

Deiria's countenance, on the contrary, was livid with rare passion. There was indignation, incomprehension and fury in the look she dealt to Olver, for a moment forgetting her station, Mat and Tuon in her transport. Mat was amazed to read a scorned woman's hurt in those eyes behind the anger.

"How then, Olver?" the High Lady spoke, a furious, solitary tear tracing the frosted marchpane of her lead-blanched cheek. "How, then? Wouldst thou from me?"

Olver met her eyes with dignity. "I would, High Lady. I beg your forgiveness for my deception, but I own loyalty to none other than the Raven Prince, the Band and the Light. In that order."

"Why, but that is infamous!" Deiria declared, rising from her throne, Daffyd clinging to his perch like a sailor to the rigging of a _raker_ in a sou'western gale. "Infamous – and I will be avenged of it!" She snatched the collar from her peregrine's throat, and the great bird spread his wings as Deiria Aladon Tanreall extended her long, bare arm in accusation. " _Daffyd. Kill!"_

With a scream and a cry, the great falcon leapt from her hand like a thunderbolt, even as the Hornsounder set the Horn of Valere to his lips and blew a resounding blast.

A great burst of Light awakened at that sonorous trump, and Dafydd spread his wings, veering away, affrighted, with a keening lament, fleeing for the open skies that lay above the unroofed Witan hall.

Blinking, Deiria sought to see beyond the Light to its bearer, a tall manlike figure with a soldier's carriage, who advanced upon her, the light appearing to go on before him like a night-watchman's lamp.

The Light dispelled, and she beheld his face. A soldier's step went with a soldier's face, hard and ironic both, with bronzed cheek and a hook of a nose that was the very archetype of a Paendrag nose, a hawk's slashing bill, set off with deep, hooded eyes that regarded the world with sadness, with understanding – and with a vivid anger that Deiria recoiled from.

This man spoke then, and at first High Lady Deiria frowned at mere gibberish, before her tutelage brought comprehension, and her ear caught the cadence of the Old Tongue. His tongue and the Light drew all ears, though he did not raise his voice to shout.

"My name is Artur Paendrag Tanreall, _Ard Ri,_ High King of the Westron World, High King over the Sea, Emperor of Seanchan. Rodholder of my legions. Great Captain. Dread Lord wherever my jurisdiction runs. Your acknowledged greatsire and genesis. I am your _Corenne_ made flesh! And you all will yield unto me, and give me answer.

I have watched the Wheel turn too long and grieved at you, my children, for so I deem you. The Horn kept me – and kept me from you – otherwise this conversation would have happened many years ago. This I hold against you. You have built upon my failures. Where I was stern, you are cruel. Where I was stone, you are _cuendillar._

I, too, own mine own fault. _Ba'alzemon's_ hand lay heavy upon me, through the lies and machinations of his servant, Ishamael, the Great Betrayer and left hand of the Father of Lies. Yet the fault is mine. Does not the Shadow touch every man's heart? So, I fought against the Aes Sedai, and took Amyrlin Bonwhin as mine enemy, laying long leaguer to Tar Valon itself, forgetting that the White Tower was a shield for the realms of men against the Shadow. I was deceived, I deceived myself, and I led others into that iniquity.

I led my armies to foreign lands, to domains beyond my ken and knowledge, even to Shara and Seanchan, and I slew my foes for mine own glory, and that was not righteous, either. The _Corenne_ stops, today – do I make myself plain? A strong man may take from the weak, and keep what he stole, but he will not prosper for it when the Light's judgement falls upon him. You may take my word for it.

Therefore, I decree that you may keep Altara, Tarabon and Ebou Dar, but no further shall you go, either west or east, north or south, or the Light condemn you. And you will keep the Dragon's Peace, which you forswore, and make amends for breaking the compact, to whatever measure Malkier, the Borderland nations and the Aiel people require, even to the fifth part of your goods and chattels, if that is necessary, in the name of peace and the Light.

This thing of _damane_ and _sul'dam_ is iniquitous, and I reject it here, under the Light, and hold ye all to the same – else away with you all, and call yourselves no longer sons of mine!

This thing of _da'covale_ is infamous likewise. All men and women stand equal under the Light, and slavery an affront to the dignity of mankind and his Creator, who woke us all from mere clay with His breath, ensouled us, and gave us the determination of will and its free expression.

Here, Artur Hawkwing turned upon the _sul'dam_ shielding Tuon, and for all the One Power, they quailed before him. "You will release that woman, immediately, and you will release the other _damane_ and that too, right swiftly, or you shall all answer to me!"

To Mat's amazement, they leapt to Artur Hawkwing's bidding, _sul'dam_ snatching the collars from those they had enslaved, and edging back from their angry charges.

"And you too, you _damane_ , you shall not take vengeance. You are free women" continued Artur Hawkwing. "Furthermore, I decree to you all my ancestral crown lands in Seandar, lands which I bequeath now to the White Tower across the sea in perpetuity, in recompense for my unjust war upon them.

In those lands shall you dwell, where you will abide by the Law of the Aes Sedai and under the authority of the Amyrlin Seat, Cadsuane Melaidhrin, and her lawful successors. There you may live your days in peace, or bind yourselves to the Aes Sedai if that is your determination. Or you may travel and live where you please, subject to the kingdom's common law.

You _sul'dam_ … I did think to try you for your crimes, or hand you to the Aes Sedai for judgement but I am minded to give you armistice. But you shall not inherit in the gift of my lands to those you enslaved – even though you also can learn to channel, and would yourselves be _marath'damane_ as you accounted it – and you will not prosper from your misdeeds. I strip from you lands, property and titles but not life nor liberty. Go into the world and learn to serve others in humility.

This more will I say on those who channel, be they men or women, then will I have done. Let there be no more talk of ' _marath'damane'._ Channelling is a gift of the Light, intended for men and women to exercise in order to benefit their fellow and to protect against the Shadow.

Let you say instead 'those who have the blessing' or 'those who the Light blessed'. True, there will always be those who misuse that blessing, either for dominion, or to serve the Shadow. So much the worse for them: let them be accursed amongst the nations."

Taking a deep breath, Artur Hawkwing turned back to where Tuon knelt. Mat swallowed dryly at the determined expression upon the High King's face as he unsheathed Justice. Yet he remained still. If this was the day of their own redress and reckoning, Mat thought, then he stood ready, and without complaint. He asked of the Light only that he share Tuon's fate.

"I did not come back to rule over you, but to name my heir." Hawkwing proclaimed. "Look, children of men, and see me true. I come with a sword, but for peace. Is there man or woman amongst you who dare decry my right to name that successor?"

At that there was a great stirring amongst the throng, but nobody dared make answer.

"I look about me for a man or a woman of determination, who bears my blood, and find but squabbling children. Save one alone, and I name her daughter, loved and cherished. Though even she is not without sin. Kin's blood is upon her hands – of sister, brother and sister-mother.

Yet if she stands attaindered, then I must condemn you all. She alone did her murder with tears in her eyes, did her murder and did remorse and penance, did her murder only for Seanchan and her people or in last defence of her own life and not for selfish gain. And even so, she would lie under Shadow to this day, but she showed true repentance, and at the last spared the life of her son, Mordred, despite his crimes.

I give you my Daughter-Heir and successor. Fortuona Aetham Devi Paendrag, Steward of the Light's Grace, Empress of Seanchan, regent of Ebou Dar, Altara, Tarebon and their dominions."

And Hawkwing brought Justic down lightly upon Tuon's shoulder in anointing.

"And now, Empress" Hawkwing proclaimed, offering her his hand. "You may rise and take your place."

Tuon took Artur Hawkwing's hand, and with gentle strength, the High King pulled her to her feet, enveloping her in a warm embrace, before relinquishing a Tuon that submitted to it somewhat woodenly, such was her amazement at his public display of emotion. It seemed some customs did change over a thousand-odd years, Mat pondered.

He was amazed to see tears in the bluff old warrior's eyes. "'Pon my soul, you even look like her." Hawkwing muttered, appraising his heir. "My Laerelle, that I lost in Shara. She too was a contrary, stubborn wee thing. The Wheel turns, and all things come round again, for good or ill…."

"As for you, Maitrim, you rogue, you" continued Hawkwing, clapping a heavy hand on Mat's shoulder. "It seems you've turned into a halfway-reasonable son-in-law, after all, and I cry you thanks for standing beside my daughter so loyally.

Just as well for you, mind! The other sort of suitor tended to meet with… unfortunate accidents. The kind that are unfortunate, but not regrettable… ..Looks like you and I won't get to have a square-go over a battle field in this age, Mat. More's the bloody pity!"

Mat offered a shrug to that, a wordless, 'what can a man do?' _The man just thanked me, complimented me, obliquely threatened me, then regretted not being able to declare war on me, all within the space of thirty seconds. How am I expected to respond to that?_

Hawkwing's eyes hooded, his brow furrowing with thought. "I feel the Wheel's call," he intimated to Mat and Tuon in a quiet voice, a piquant regret shading those enigmatic eyes. His tall form was framed by a growing light. "I must away. May you fare well, daughter, Gambler."

The Light enveloped the High King, and he was gone.

* * *

Mat and Tuon shared a look. "That certainly earns us breathing space" Mat whispered into Tuon's ear, casting a concerned look at the assembled Blood, who were all staring in stupefaction at where Artur Hawkwing had been a moment before. "Does that mean we're free and clear?"

Tuon shook her head, and chuckled. "Light, no!" she replied. "Hawkwing was right to leave when he did. Before they remembered he was but a mere man and not the Light made flesh. As it stands, his words are our anointing, and will go before us throughout the Empire and beyond, but as for 'free and clear'… that we shall never be. We're always going to have to watch our backs. …

Knotai, I have a question. Your plan was a good one, and has bought the Raven Empire time, for as long as we two live, but what about afterward? You know Mordred is banished for life, and I can have no more children. What then? It seems to me that we but defer the anarchy of today."

"'Anarchy deferred' is an alternative definition for 'ruling'" quoted Mat, dryly. "Nevertheless, I take your point. Mordred may be banished, and lost to us, but _his_ children are not."

Tuon's large, liquid eyes met Mat's, solemnly. "No, they're not, are they?" she agreed. "Now all I need to do is hang on to the reins of power for another twenty-odd years so they can inherit. You good for another twenty years in the saddle, Raven Prince?"

Mat groaned, then chuckled. "I _swear_ that's innuendo…. Yes, Tuon, I daresay I'm good for twenty more years of intrigue, double-dealing, treachery, backstabbing and all things Seanchan. Give me enough _kaf,_ brandy and imported Two Rivers tabac and ale, and I'm good to go!"


	99. Chapter 99: A Gift Of Passage

**Chapter 99: A Gift of Passage**

Estar Min Running Wave was landsick.

Hungover with it, that was the Light's own truth. Morose, she perched atop of a cast iron bollard that was the stern mooring of her ship, the _Kraken_ , long pantaloon-clad legs stretched out before her, leaving her deck-callused feet and slim calves bare _._ Light, but she didn't know how the shorebound coped with the way the land pitched and yawed under their feet!

That was how it felt presently, anyway, to Estar Min, as she idly whittled at a piece of white Tarabon ash, grateful of the shade afforded her by the _Kraken's_ high stern-castle from the summer sun, hot enough to melt the pitch on the ship's deck. Truth was, she didn't like to be parted from him, the cherished craft that had been shelter and protection to Estar Min since she first entered the world, whelped at sea under a gale of twenty knots.

"Your mother and the ship's cat both littered that night," – that was how the old saw went, "and the Creator knows, the kittens we drowned were of more use!"

Estar Min looked down at her carving. There was a creature imprisoned in every piece of flotsam wood that her knife would set free, that was her small talent. She didn't even have to think about it, or choose. The knife would decide for her as she pared away rills of wood absent-mindedly. But not today. Her heart wasn't in it.

Idly, she tossed the small piece of driftwood over the edge of the dock where the fouled, oily waters briefly claimed it before it bobbed stoically to the surface, a squirrel's limpid eye on the half-carved face looking judgementally upon her for spurning him.

She looked up, her attention caught by the sound of softly-conversing voices. Two men together, the one tall and fair of skin, with almost the rolling gait of the _Atha'an Miere_. He had the weatherbeaten, unsettled look of a man who had been many places.

As the pair drew nigh, Estar saw that he had an eye-patch under a broad-brimmed Tairen hat, lending his bronzed face an ironic mien. His clothing was Tairen, too, a kind of pastiche on the garb preferred by High Lords and the well-to-do, silks and lace ruffs aplenty but somehow with a countryman's sensibilities about it. A practicality, in the way that the confection of lace at his wrists did not incumber those long-fingered, animated hands.

Estar Min frowned, as her keen eyes narrowed in on the outline of a concealed knife upon the man's left forearm, the tailor having fitted the clothing to disguise the presence of the blade. _Where there's one hidden weapon, there are doubtless more,_ the Sea Folk woman thought, discerning another concealed knife in his boot!

The other man was short and dark, with the kind of compact, dense strength that some shorter men possess. A man old within his years. He, too, looked like a man who had travelled far, but a journey that had been within himself, for the most part. As different a pair as you could hope to meet – if she didn't miss her guess, the tall man was Andoran, and the shorter one, Seanchan – and yet a matched pair, in some undefinable way.

 _Almost,_ she thought, _they might be father and son._

The short fellow had a short sword upon his hip, a plain, serviceable-looking weapon which looked very much at home there. Belonged, in much the same way as the sword at the hip of a Master of the Blades did.

 _Both these men are dangerous, in their way_ , Estar Min understood immediately – you could not carouse among the shorebound in places like Ebou Dar and Tear and not learn to recognise the signs of danger in a bravo or shoulderthumper.

But these two were neither, Estar Min reckoned. Their relaxed though alert bearing and upright carriage marked them as soldiers. Soldiers and perhaps something more, because a dim and distant memory was trying to swim to the surface of Estar Min's grog-addled mind. The shape of a recollection, seen through the lens of a bottle of arrack.

The tall man, seeing Estar Min, hailed her, sweeping the hat from his head in gallant salutation. _Well,_ thought she, brightening somewhat as she rose from her perch, albeit a trifle unsteadily, _I mustn't look too much like Shai'tan's leavings, despite the ocean of port and brandy I drowned in last night._

"Good afternoon, fair maid" said he, "good afternoon, and I wish you joy of it! My son here wishes for the gift of passage. To far Tremalking, and perhaps farther afield – to Qaim or Cindaking to dwell amongst the remnants of the Amayar in peaceful contemplation for a time. Perhaps we could come to some kind of understanding…?"

His voice trailed off as Estar Min froze, her gaze going to the younger man. She _had_ seen him – or at least his likeness, drawn in pen and ink.

Estar Min's voice was tempered ice, too as she cut across his wordy greeting. "I'm afraid that will not be possible. I know precisely who your companion is, and I have been instructed to refuse him the Gift, and see him escorted from our docks and into the custody of the Ebou Dar town watch. He is …."

Mat Cauthon stepped forward, placing a hand upon her henna-tattooed elbow, lightly. "Hush, for the Light's sake!" he bade her, glancing about him furtively. "Lower your voice. Why, this is my son, Abell Aron Cauthon, late of the Two Rivers in Andor, who has taken a fancy to see the world, much as I did at the same age. I can't imagine who you believe him to be, but please cast your aspersions elsewhere! My boy is a good lad…." Mat blustered.

Estar Min shook her head, urgently hissing her reply so only the two of them could hear. "I can hazard a guess as to who you are too, _Master_ Cauthon of the Two Rivers in Andor. A strange thing, that you share a surname with a most illustrious personage …!"

"A _most_ illustrious personage – who perhaps is in a position to suggest a mutually beneficial arrangement to his worthy self and to the _Atha'an Miere_? Who happens to be an intimate of the Coramoor himself? That kind of fellow? Who also happens to be one who has never shaped up tricky in regards to the Sea Folk?"

Estar Min gave Master Cauthon the Elder a wary, sidelong look. "I do believe" she offered, "that such a 'mutually beneficial arrangement' might be better discussed with my Sailmistress, or even the Wavemistress, Harin din Togara Two Winds herself and not with Cerise's lowly daughter Estar Min, Master Cauthon. If it please the Light."

Mat favoured her with a sympathetic look. "Yes, I do believe that might be for the best, Estar Min. If I could trouble you..?"

Hangover notwithstanding, the young Atha'an Miere woman took off at a fair clip, scampering up a rope ladder onto the _Kraken's_ deck before disappearing out of sight into the bowels of the vessel.

Mat watched her for a moment. Those pantaloons were very fetching.

* * *

Proud as a swan protecting his nest, the _Kraken_ danced upon the waters under a wisp of wind, plucking at his mooring lines, The _raker'_ s teak sides gunmetal black, were waisted like a feather-dancer, a construction of arabesques and flowing lines, machicolations of whorled wood that painted the brackish water below like an artist's oils.

Abell Aron Cauthon turned to his father. "Do you think…"

"Yes" Mat replied, taking out his pipe, and seating himself down upon the bollard the Sea Folk girl had vacated, thumbing tabac into the broad clay bowl. "They will take you. We will exchange pleasantries. They will name a price, and we will haggle a little – if we didn't, it would offend them – and then we will pay it."

Abell turned to eye where the Sea Folk girl had last been. "You know" he essayed a laugh. "I might find this trip somewhat to my liking, after all."

 _That's someone trying to remember what laughter sounds like,_ Mat thought. _Oh, Light, boy, what have you done to yourself? To all of us._

"I should bloody well hope that is the case" he replied, shortly. "Seeing as it is likely to cost a pretty penny." _More harshly than I intended,_ Mat rued, uselessly wishing the words back.

Abell fidgeted with his belt. Mat lit his pipe. Took a deep draught from it. Exhaled slowly, releasing a long, tapering stream of white smoke, then a slightly twisted grey ring that revolved slowly, fraying, before falling apart.

"I'm sorry" Abell said, hesitantly. "That you had to lie to her. Tell her I was your son. A 'good lad'. When we both know what I am. A murderer."

"Don't talk wet" retorted Mat, taking the pipe-stem from his lips and laying it down beside him deliberately as he fixed Abell with a penetrating gaze. "You _are_ my son. For better and for ill. That means we – me and Tuon – bear your iniquities, as if they were our own. ….

Look, boy. You've done what you've done, and there's no getting around that fact. That's something you're going to have to live with for the rest of your life. There's no escaping it. And there's no making amends. The good you do does not expunge the bad – any more than the bad erases the good, for that matter.

But we forgive you, me and your mother – and mayhap, others will too, or choose to judge you for the man you are today, and not the deeds of your past. That's not nothing, boy. And if that's not enough for you, you need to learn humility.

Look around you, son. The sun's shining. The breeze filling the sails that will bear you into your future. There's grace for the man you've been. Who you become from hereon in, that's up to you. You know, a woman once told me that the great saints and the great sinners come from the same stock. Sometimes, the capacity for both live within the same man. Who knows? Perhaps she was right."

Mat tapped out the ashes of his pipe and stood, placing both hands in the small of his back and stretching out the ache. "Whatever is good, whatever is true, noble, excellent, praiseworthy and valiant – reflect upon those things. The Creator has given you a strong arm and broad shoulders to bear the load for others, a keen mind to discern truth.

The worst thing you could do from here is to spurn those gifts. To retreat into the bottle, or to take your own life." The man who had been the warlord Mordred Paendrag started at that, as one who finds himself discovered. "You think I didn't know? It's written all over your face, son. And it grieves me. Go out there and make something of yourself. Come back a better man."

The pair of them looked up from their reverie, their attention caught by curious faces appearing at the rail of the ship's decking, far above. Time was not their own for much longer. It ran though Mat's fingers like coral sand, and it was enough to make a man weep. _Why could there not be more time to say what needed saying? Something, a trove of fond memories to set against the wasted years?_

Abell's failures were Mat's own, at least in part. And now he must send the boy out, alone, to face a hostile world. A man did what he must, not what he willed. That was a hard lesson. The hardest. A lesson Mat Cauthon was still learning.

Abell saw the decision in his father's face, and stepped forward, offering his hand in the warrior's grip. Mat ignored the proffered hand, clutching Abell to him, feeling his son's furze of close-cropped hair bristle against his own neck. Neither spoke, and neither man wept, not so much as a single tear. _Light, if I started, I should never stop,_ Mat knew.

Above them, the Sea Folk Wavemistress watched and waited, deliberating her price.

 **THE END**


End file.
